So we made the move last quarter. We were paying for OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, a couple others—you know how it goes. Separate invoices, separate integrations, separate headaches. The promise was always there: one subscription, 400+ models, unified pricing. On paper it looked clean.
What we found in practice was messier but ultimately worthwhile. The first month we almost didn’t see any savings because we were rebuilding workflows to work with the new platform. Our team had to learn the visual builder, which honestly took less time than I expected. A few workflows needed tweaking, but nothing catastrophic.
The real win came when we stopped paying for models we barely used. We had a Cohere subscription going unused because our developers just defaulted to OpenAI. Once everything was under one interface, we could actually see what we were using and optimize. That alone cut about 35% off our AI spend.
But here’s the thing nobody talks about: licensing complexity didn’t disappear, it just shifted. We moved from managing multiple vendor relationships to managing one platform’s pricing tiers and usage limits. We actually hired someone to track our usage across departments because teams were spinning up workflows without clear governance.
Total TCO dropped, yeah. But it wasn’t as dramatic as the pitch suggested. It was maybe 20-25% lower than our previous setup once you factor in the time spent migrating and the new processes we had to build.
I’m curious—anyone else gone through consolidation and hit unexpected costs on the backend? What actually moved the needle for your margins?
We did something similar but started small. Instead of moving everything at once, we picked our three heaviest workflows and migrated those first. That let us validate the pricing model without forcing everyone to relearn everything overnight.
The margin thing—yeah, it’s real but not magic. We saw about 18% savings after four months. The hidden cost we didn’t anticipate was spend governance. Without clear limits, certain teams started throwing more AI agents at problems just because they could. We had to implement usage alerts and department budgets.
One thing that actually helped us: the platform has ready-to-use templates for common workflows. We didn’t use them exactly as-is, but they showed us patterns we hadn’t considered. Saved a few weeks of rebuilding from scratch.
The licensing piece you mentioned is key. We went from not knowing what we were using to obsessing over it. That’s not entirely bad—awareness is valuable—but it does add operational overhead that doesn’t show up in the initial ROI math.
Your point about unused subscriptions resonates. We had the same problem. We were paying for three different LLM APIs but our team kept defaulting to one because of switching costs in their existing code. Once we moved to a unified subscription, consolidation happened naturally because there was no friction anymore.
The governance piece though—that’s where we stumbled. We actually created more cost problems before we solved them. Teams started experimenting with autonomous agents thinking it would be free or cheap. It wasn’t. We had to put real structure around it: approved use cases, cost attribution by department, quarterly reviews.
What helped for us was treating the migration not as a cost-cutting project but as a process improvement project. Yes, we saved money. But what we really got was visibility into how automation was actually being used across the organization. That visibility is worth real money in terms of efficiency.
That 20-25% figure feels honest. Everyone wants to hear 50% savings, but consolidation doesn’t work that way in reality. We modeled it differently: what’s our current state, what are we actually using, what’s waste, what’s switching friction?
Our takeaway was that the value wasn’t just in price reduction. It was in standardization. When everyone’s using the same platform, you can actually build shared workflows and templates. That reuse saves money in a different way—development time, not just model costs. We probably saved more from not rebuilding the same workflows five times than from consolidating subscriptions.