We’re in the early stages of evaluating a migration from our current proprietary BPM setup to open-source alternatives, and I’m hitting a wall trying to build a realistic cost model for our CFO.
Right now, we’re running eight separate AI model subscriptions across different teams—one for document processing, another for content generation, a different one for data analysis. Each has its own contract, renewal dates, and integration points. When I try to calculate the actual TCO for a migration, I keep getting lost in the licensing matrix. Do I factor in each subscription separately? Do I depreciate our current Camunda license? Where does the cost of consolidation actually fit?
I’ve read that platforms using a unified subscription for multiple AI models can simplify this calculation significantly, but I’m skeptical about whether that’s just marketing or if there’s real math behind it. The problem is, nobody on my team has actually built a migration cost model when they’re juggling this many vendor relationships simultaneously.
How are you actually structuring your TCO calculations when you’re moving away from fragmented licensing? Are you using templates or frameworks to baseline the costs, or is this mostly spreadsheet work that gets rebuilt every time finance asks a different question? And more importantly—when you consolidate to a single subscription approach, what actually changes in how you calculate the ROI?