The TCO calculation gets clearer when you factor in the non-obvious costs. Beyond subscription fees, there’s infrastructure management for credential rotation, monitoring tools to track usage across multiple APIs, and engineering time spent debugging when one service has an outage while others don’t. We were running a separate monitoring dashboard just to keep track of rate limits across our 12 subscriptions.
When we looked at consolidating, the financial case wasn’t just lower monthly fees—it was eliminating the entire operational stack around managing fragmented services. The engineering team went from spending approximately two days per sprint on maintenance and issue resolution to maybe a few hours. Over a year, that’s significant capacity freed up for actual feature work.
What helped us make the business case: calculating the fully loaded cost of engineering time spent on maintenance, then showing how consolidation reduced that burden. Finance understood that language better than just lower subscription costs.