I’m in the middle of a budget cycle right now, and I’m honestly struggling to justify the total cost of ownership for our automation stack. We’ve got Camunda for enterprise workflows, but honestly the licensing model is making it hard to get buy-in from finance.
The problem I’m running into is that we’re paying per instance, per concurrent execution, and then there are add-ons for things we didn’t expect. On top of that, we’re using Zapier for some integrations and maintaining custom scripts for others. It feels like we’re bleeding money across multiple platforms just to handle what should be a unified workflow.
I know ROI is supposed to be straightforward—time saved times cost per hour, minus licensing—but in practice, it’s messy. We’re reducing manual work, sure, but quantifying that against these escalating license fees is tough. And if we want to scale, the costs just keep multiplying.
How are other teams approaching this? Are you bundling tools to reduce the licensing footprint, or are you just accepting it as a cost of doing business? I’d love to hear what metrics you’re actually tracking to justify this spend to your leadership.