3,632 paid Zoom licences reclaimed
An Australian electricity distributor had been paying for around 3,700 Zoom licences since the pandemic, alongside the Microsoft 365 suite that came with Teams. Zoom's free Basic licence already covers any meeting up to 40 minutes, so a paid licence is only required once someone runs a meeting longer than that. Over ten months, 91% of their users never ran a meeting past that limit, and most never hosted a meeting at all. So they stripped the paid Zoom licences back to the few who actually needed them, and cut the cost by 98%.
000000 - people out of 3,700 ever hosted a meeting longer than the free Basic licence's 40 minutes
0,0000,000 - paid licences reclaimed, 98% of the subscription
~$000k~$000k - off the annual cost, for tools they already owned
The problem
The distributor rolled Zoom out in a hurry in 2020, the way most companies did, and never rolled it back. By 2025 the organisation had around 3,700 paid Zoom licences. In the meantime, the organisation had standardised on Microsoft 365. Every one of those people already had a Teams licence as well as a paid Zoom licence for meetings. Everyone suspected Zoom was underused, but nobody could prove it. Zoom's admin portal will tell you who logged in, but a login says nothing about whether someone needs a paid licence, and with meetings spread across hosts there was no practical way to tell the heavy users from the people who joined two calls a year. So, renewal after renewal, the safe move was to keep paying.
The 40 minute question
With Zoom's free Basic licence, anyone can host meetings up to 40 minutes at a time. You only need a paid licence to run meetings that are longer, or that have more people in them. To check whether a paid licence is required, ask whether this person has hosted a meeting longer than 40 minutes or with more participants than allowed on Basic. Subble applied that test to every meeting hosted by the distributor's people. People whose meetings stayed within both limits could move to Basic without losing anything they used. Ten months of the distributor's meeting history gave a clear answer.
4,808
meetings hosted across ten months, on ~3,700 paid licences
2,022
of those meetings actually ran longer than 40 minutes
474
people hosted a meeting of any length at all
321
people ever hosted a meeting that needed a paid licence
Who actually used Zoom
Out of roughly 3,700 paid licences, 321 people had hosted at least one meeting that needed a paid licence. Another 153 hosted meetings, all of which the free Basic licence already covers. The remaining 3,244, nearly nine in ten, hadn’t hosted a single meeting in ten months.
Zoom vs Teams, department by department
Idle licences on their own weren't enough to act on. Cutting Zoom for thousands of people was a big call, and the distributor wanted to be sure no one would miss it. Because Subble was already connected to both the Zoom account and the Microsoft tenant, the distributor could build custom reports comparing the two side by side: licences and activity by department, Zoom against Microsoft 365. The reports showed that 97% of the people assigned a paid Zoom licence already had a Microsoft 365 licence with Teams included, and virtually all of them were using Teams. There was no department where Zoom was the primary way of working. Teams wasn't a migration that needed a rollout plan, because it was already in place.
The migration
From first sync to the big move took under a year, and most of that was just waiting for enough data to accumulate.
- 1
Connect Zoom and sync the history
The distributor connected their Zoom account to Subble around the middle of 2025. Subble pulled every licence and every hosted meeting, with duration and participant counts, going back years, then kept it in sync automatically.
- 2
Check every meeting against the free Basic licence's limit
Zoom’s free Basic licence already covers meetings up to 40 minutes. Subble classified each hosted meeting as inside or outside that limit and identified every paid licence whose user had never gone past it: nine out of ten of them.
- 3
Check Teams could absorb the load
Custom reports in Subble compared Zoom and Microsoft adoption department by department. 97% of the people assigned a paid Zoom licence already had a Microsoft 365 licence with Teams included, and nearly all of them were using it.
- 4
Move the meetings, reclaim the licences
With the evidence in front of them, they went ahead. In a single month, 3,632 paid Zoom licences were unassigned. The handful of genuine heavy hosts moved their meetings to Teams.
Zoom meetings hosted per month
The monthly meeting count fell sharply: from nearly 900 meetings a month at peak to 26 in the final month, as the remaining hosts moved their meetings to Teams.
The result
98%
of the paid Zoom subscription reclaimed: 3,718 paid licences down to 86
~$220k / year
off the invoice at their negotiated enterprise rate; at Zoom list pricing the same licences would cost over $1.2m a year
$0
spent on replacement tooling, because Teams was already included in their Microsoft 365 licences
0 disruption
the 321 genuine meeting hosts moved to Teams; everyone else had never used the paid features anyway
What’s next
A small pool of 86 paid licences remains for the genuine use cases, and each one is now accounted for by name. Zoom stays connected to Subble, so if idle paid licences ever start to build up again, the same downgrade recommendations appear on day one instead of at the next contract renewal. And the analysis that unwound Zoom is now running across the rest of the distributor’s stack.
“We always suspected Zoom was underused, but suspicion doesn’t get a tool switched off. Subble showed us, meeting by meeting, that nine in ten of our people never once did anything the free tier couldn’t do, and that everyone was already on Teams anyway. After that, the decision made itself.”
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