Our finance team has been operating under the assumption that automation costs are: Camunda license ($X), OpenAI API ($Y), Claude subscription ($Z), plus a few other vendor costs. Line items, predictable, trackable.
Now we’re exploring platforms with unified pricing—one subscription covers 400+ AI models. Which is cool from a usability perspective, but it’s throwing finance a curveball. They want to understand what we’re paying for, and I don’t have a good way to explain it when it’s bundled.
The immediate question from finance: “How do we forecast this? What happens when utilization changes? Can we actually compare cost per model?”
I get where they’re coming from. Itemized bills feel transparent. But I suspect the unified model is actually more transparent in a different way—you see total spend, you’re not hunting for hidden fees across five vendors.
How have others handled this conversation with finance? What does the business case actually look like when you’re moving from itemized costs to bundled?
Our CFO had the same reaction. Here’s what actually worked: I stopped trying to map individual item costs and instead showed total spend comparison.
I pulled twelve months of Camunda invoices, OpenAI usage, Claude costs, plus everything else scattered across different vendors. Added them up. Then I showed what unified pricing would cost for the same utilization levels we actually hit.
Suddenly it clicked because the finance team could see the absolute number. We were fragmented across eight vendors. Unified pricing was 30% less per month. They don’t need to understand which specific model is cheaper—they need to know total spend is lower and more predictable.
The second part of conversation was predictability. With itemized bills, usage spikes hit the invoice unpredictably. With unified pricing, you know exactly what you’re paying whether you use 10% or 80% of available models. Finance loves that. Easier to forecast, easier to budget, easier to explain to executives.
I’d recommend pulling your actual spend history, annualizing it, and comparing that to unified pricing. If it’s lower and more stable, the business case is straightforward.