The Most Overpaid Software in Your Company Is Your OKR Dashboard.

The most overpaid software in your company is not your CRM. It’s not your project management tool. It’s your OKR dashboard.

And it’s not overpaid because the software itself costs a lot. Let’s say you’re paying $20 or $30 per seat. 100 people in your company using it.

That’s

$24,000 to $36,000 a year. Not cheap, but not insane either.

But if you think that’s the only cost you’re paying, you’re completely wrong.

The Cost You See: Software

$20-30 per seat. 100 people. $24,000-$36,000 a year. That’s the line item on your budget. That’s what the CFO approves. That’s what the vendor invoices you for.

That’s maybe 10% of the real cost. The other 90% is invisible and it’s bleeding your company dry.

The Cost You Ignore: Meetings

OKR dashboard needs check-in meetings. Every week, people have to log in, update their key results, their KPIs, and sometimes even their tasks because many companies use OKR tools to track tasks too.

But here’s what actually happens. Most people open the OKR dashboard five minutes before the meeting.

They quickly fill in data not real data, just numbers that make everything look green for the management team. Then they walk into the meeting looking prepared.

Now calculate what that meeting costs. 10 people in a room. $50/hour average loaded cost. That’s $500 for one meeting. Four meetings a month across five teams.

That’s $10,000 a month. $120,000 a year. Just in meeting time. For meetings where people present data they entered five minutes ago.

And nobody in that meeting questions whether the data is real.

Nobody asks if the person who marked their key result as “70% complete” actually measured it or just guessed.

The meeting ends. Everyone goes back to their work. Nothing changes until next week. Same meeting. Same scramble.

Same fiction. Fifty-two weeks a year.

The Cost You Can’t Calculate: Wrong Goals, No Enforcement

Here’s where it gets really expensive.

Let’s say you’re a company that wants to grow in India. Your goal: open 100 retail shops. Sounds clear, right?

But the actual metric that matters isn’t “stores opened.” It’s “100 stores generating ₹100 crore in monthly revenue.”

If you set the wrong metric, your team will open 100 stores that lose money and celebrate hitting the goal.

No OKR software on the market will tell you that you set the wrong metric. There’s no AI detection. No recommendation to update your goals. No one inside the software is holding anyone accountable for whether the goal even makes sense.

And when things go wrong, when the stores aren’t opening on schedule, none of the problems are escalated inside the software. The escalation happens the old-fashioned way.

The head of the parent company in New York picks up the phone, calls the India representative, and asks what’s going on.

That phone call is when actual progress happens. Not through the software. Through a frustrated executive making a manual follow-up.

That’s the enforcement gap. You’re paying for software that should be doing this automatically flagging the risk, escalating the delay, alerting leadership before it becomes a crisis.

Instead, you’re paying for a tool that sits there and waits for someone to update a number.

The Cost of Being Blind Until Quarter  End

The most expensive cost of all is visibility or rather, the complete lack of it.

Your executive team doesn’t know what’s actually happening with company goals until the quarter ends. That’s when they discover which teams failed, who didn’t produce results, and which key results were quietly abandoned weeks ago.

But shouldn’t the software you’re paying $30,000+ a year for show you this BEFORE the quarter ends?

Shouldn’t it tell you in week 3 that a key result hasn’t been touched?

Shouldn’t it escalate in week 5 when a team is clearly off track?

What is the point of an OKR tool if your executives don’t know where the risk is, who the risk is, or what’s failing, until it’s too late to fix?

Companies spending $5,000, $10,000, or more per year on this software should be getting features that help them grow. They should be getting 2-3x ROI from the tool.

Instead, they’re getting a dashboard that hides failure behind green status bars and tells leadership everything is fine until the quarterly review proves otherwise.

Companies Succeed Despite the Software, Not Because of It

You might be wondering, if OKR tools are this broken, why do companies using them still succeed?

Because companies succeed because of their vision, their leadership, and their team’s drive. Not because someone updated a progress bar on a Friday afternoon. The OKR tool gets zero credit for that success.

But here’s the tragedy: if those same companies had a tool that actually enforced execution, that tracked who’s falling behind, predicted which goals would fail, and escalated problems before they compounded, they’d achieve 2-3x more than they’re achieving today.

They’re winning with dead weight. Imagine what they’d do without it.

The Existing OKR Market Sells  You a Glorified Excel Sheet

I’ll say it plainly: the current OKR market produces glorified Excel sheets to track your goals. That’s it. They don’t do much beyond that, except charge you a lot of money for the privilege.

An actual Excel sheet or Google Sheet doesn’t charge you anything. So here’s my honest advice: go to Upwork, hire a spreadsheet expert, design a custom goal tracker, and use that for your company.

Just kidding. Sign up for ShiftFocus.

We built ShiftFocus OS because the OKR tool you’re overpaying for should be doing a lot more than collecting check-ins and producing green dashboards.

It should be enforcing execution, flagging risks, escalating problems, and showing your leadership team the truth not at the end of the quarter, but in the first few weeks when there’s still time to act.

Stop overpaying for software that does less than a spreadsheet. Start paying for software that actually makes your company execute.