Snyk Turns Software Negotiation Leverage Into Hard Savings With Tropic

Getting the best deal, every time

Before Tropic, Chris and his team were negotiating without a reliable way to know if they were getting a fair price. “We were kinda flying blind,” he said. “You're going into these negotiations. You've always got this thing in the back of your mind that there's more juice left to squeeze.”

Chris knew he wanted data he could bring to conversation himself. “I was looking to have information that I could go to the table with the relevant supplier and actually have information that I knew I could push on in the different levers,” he said. That's what led him to Tropic.

The impact showed up immediately in how purchases get approved internally. Every renewal or net-new purchase at Snyk requires justification, and benchmarking data gives that justification weight. “It's not just me saying this,” Chris said. “It's always good to have something you can fall back on.”

The team has caught cases where the business brought in a deal they believed was already the best available, only for Tropic's benchmarking to uncover an additional $20K to $30K in savings. “The business is blown away,” he said.

That credibility compounds. Third-party data is easier for business stakeholders to trust than procurement's opinion alone, even when procurement is right. “It's not that they don't trust procurement,” Chris said. “It's just so much easier” when a stakeholder can see the number written down and validated externally. Benchmarking with Tropic is now a standard part of Snyk's purchase process. “People are now expecting us to be able to have this as part of the justification,” he said.

How Snyk uses Tropic

New purchases: Snyk reviews an incoming proposal, then runs it through Tropic before negotiating. For smaller, less complex deals, Chris's team self-serves using Tropic's negotiation playbooks and SKU-level pricing dials. For larger or more complex purchases, they request a Tropic advisor to benchmark the deal directly. Either path, the benchmark comes back before the business stakeholder is looped in, so everyone starts the conversation knowing where the proposal sits against industry pricing.

Renewals: Snyk loaded its contracts into Tropic, which surfaces upcoming renewals and flags where there's likely room to negotiate versus where a deal is already priced well. “It allows us to understand where we stand,” Chris said. That triage matters because time is limited. “Knowing when to stop is as important as knowing there's an opportunity,” as Chris said, every hour spent pushing on one supplier is an hour not spent elsewhere.

Contract insights: Chris uses Tropic to see, at a glance, which upcoming renewals have negotiation upside and which don't, rather than manually re-evaluating every contract.When Chris wants an answer without navigating to a dashboard, he asks Tropic's AI directly, for example, where his current savings opportunities are.

Claude + MCP: Snyk connected to Tropic's published MCP server without needing a custom request. As an AI-forward company itself, Snyk's team now pulls renewal status and benchmarking data directly into Claude Desktop instead of logging into a separate platform. “We didn't need to come to you to ask for an MCP server to connect,” Chris said. “You've already got that. You've published it. We've connected it.” This, combined with Tropic's pulse survey feature to collect stakeholder feedback on vendors and renewals, has helped streamline all of Snyk’s workflow. 

A $30-per-seat renewal that should have been $10

One renewal stands out. A vendor quoted Snyk a per-seat license price of roughly $30. Tropic's benchmark showed the market rate was closer to $10 per seat — a three-times gap. Chris's team used the benchmark, plus negotiation guidance from Tropic's playbook, to push the price down. “We just hammered it down,” he said. “We didn't settle.”

The savings became part of the purchase requisition itself, alongside documented proof that the final price was benchmarked and validated, which pre-empts the follow-up question Chris says he always gets: is there more? “That can help close the conversation down,” he said. On other deals, the benchmark shows Snyk is already getting the best rate available, and the team uses that as validation instead of a reason to keep pushing.

Why benchmarking data still matters to an experienced negotiator

Chris has heard the argument before: an experienced procurement leader with a strong peer network and years of negotiating history doesn't need pricing data. He disagrees. “The world's changed,” he said. “Things get more and more complex.” Without current benchmarking, he says, there's no way to know if money is being left on the table. “I would argue you always want more data, and you want to make sure that data is high quality, clean, and you can trust it. That's what Tropic gives us.”