We’re in the middle of planning a migration away from Camunda, and we’ve got this messy cost picture right now. We’re running separate subscriptions for OpenAI, Claude, Deepseek, and a few others—it’s gotten out of hand. Finance is asking us to justify the migration, and I’m trying to figure out how to actually show them the math works when we consolidate everything into a single subscription for 400+ models.
The thing is, I can see that one subscription should cost less than managing eight different APIs with their own billing cycles, but I’m struggling to model it in a way that makes sense to leadership. Do we compare per-call costs? Do we factor in the time our team spends managing separate vendor relationships? Are there hidden costs we’re missing when we migrate the actual workflows?
Anyone else gone through this? How did you actually structure the business case to show finance that consolidation saves money, not just simplifies things?
We did almost exactly this last year. The key is breaking it down into three buckets: actual subscription costs, management overhead, and integration complexity.
For subscription costs, we pulled 12 months of usage data from each vendor—calls made, tokens used, the whole thing. Then we modeled what that same volume would cost on a single subscription. For us, it was roughly 40% cheaper per transaction once we consolidated.
But here’s what finance actually cared about: we had three people spending maybe 10 hours a month managing vendor relationships, monitoring billing across platforms, and handling credential rotation. When we moved to one subscription, that dropped to maybe 2 hours a month. That’s real money when you factor in fully loaded cost.
Integration complexity is trickier. We estimated something like 200 hours of developer time spent on credential management, error handling for different API specs, and monitoring. Consolidated, that work just goes away.
When we added it all up, the ROI hit pretty quickly—something like 6 months for the migration itself, then ongoing savings. Finance approved it immediately.
One thing we didn’t anticipate was the operational simplification. When you’re managing eight subscriptions, you’re also managing eight different rate limits, eight different retry strategies, eight billing cycles. We had to build abstractions just to keep our head above water.
With one subscription, your infrastructure gets simpler. Your team can actually reason about what’s happening instead of debugging vendor-specific issues. That’s hard to quantify in a spreadsheet, but it’s real.
I’d suggest showing finance a scenario where you model both the direct cost savings and the indirect time savings. Most finance teams understand that developer time has a cost. Put a dollar amount on it, and suddenly the migration looks obvious.
The consolidation math gets even better if you factor in what happens when your usage patterns change. With separate subscriptions, you’re locked into tiers and plans for each vendor. We found ourselves overpaying on some platforms and underpaying on others just because the granularity didn’t match our actual needs. When we consolidated, we had one knob to adjust instead of eight. That flexibility alone helped us right-size our spending within the first quarter. Document your actual variable costs, not just the base plan costs, and show finance how much waste was in your old model. That’s usually the conversation that gets budget approval.
Important consideration: ensure your consolidation strategy accounts for model switching and failover. With eight separate subscriptions, you could potentially switch vendors if one had an outage or performance issue. With one subscription covering 400+ models, you need to verify that the service level agreement actually guarantees failover capabilities. Build that into your migration cost model—you might need higher tier support or specific training for your team to manage model selection and routing. Don’t skip this step, or you might save money on licensing but lose flexibility on operations.
Model it as: (Current total spend + management overhead + developer time) vs. (Single subscription cost + minimal overhead). Most migrations pay back in 4-8 months.
We tackled this exact problem at our company. The approach that worked was mapping every vendor subscription to specific workflows, then calculating what consolidation would look like.Here’s the thing—when we switched to Latenode, we got access to 400+ models on one subscription, which meant we could actually test models against all our workflows without vendor lock-in anxiety. We built a cost tracking system that showed us literally how much each model type was costing per workflow, then we could optimize.
What made finance happy was this: we showed them a before and after. Before, we had eight different dashboards to track spending. After Latenode, one dashboard, one invoice. We also realized we could run experiments with different model combinations without triggering overages or new subscription tiers. That flexibility convertedinto real savings—we cut spend by about 35% in the first six months just by being able to test and optimize without fear of hidden costs.
If you want to actually model this properly, I’d recommend tracking which workflows are using which models today, then simulate switching those to cost per model on a unified platform. That’s when you’ll see the real picture.