I’ve been looking at our automation stack and I’m genuinely confused about how to calculate what we’re actually spending. We’ve got Camunda licenses that cost a fortune, but half the workflows we built three years ago are just sitting there. Meanwhile, our finance team keeps asking me to justify the annual renewal.
I’ve read that some teams are moving to models where you pay based on execution time instead of per-operation or per-seat. That sounds different, but I’m not sure if it actually changes the math in a meaningful way.
The other thing I’m trying to understand is whether switching platforms even makes sense if we already have the licenses. Like, if we’ve already paid for Camunda, is there a scenario where moving to something like Latenode would actually pay for itself?
Has anyone else been through this? I’m trying to build a real case for either sticking with what we have or making the switch, and I need actual numbers that don’t sound like marketing.
I went through this same thing at my last gig. The trap with Camunda is that licensing is just the start. You’re also paying for the infrastructure to run it, the people to maintain it, and honestly, the constant patches and updates that seem to break things.
When I looked at it holistically, our actual cost per workflow was almost triple what we thought. That’s when the math changed. A platform that charges by execution time suddenly looks a lot better when you have 500 workflows but only run 50 of them regularly.
I’d sit down and count how many workflows you actually use in a month. Just the active ones. Then calculate your true cost per workflow. That number is usually the moment people realize switching makes sense.
The way I think about this is to break down Camunda’s total cost into three buckets: the license fee itself, the operational overhead, and the opportunity cost of the developers you need to keep things running. Most people focus only on the license fee when they calculate ROI.
When you look at platforms that charge by execution time, you’re essentially paying for what you actually use. If you run a workflow a thousand times a month, you get charged for those thousand executions. If it sits idle, you pay nothing. That’s fundamentally different from Camunda’s model.
The key question isn’t whether switching is cheaper in the first three months. It’s whether you’ll see savings over a year when you factor in reduced maintenance, fewer people needed to manage the platform, and faster deployment of new workflows.
Finance will want to see three things: migration cost, annual operational cost post-migration, and risk. Most teams underestimate migration cost, which is fair, because it’s hard to predict.
But here’s what actually matters for your case: if you’re paying for Camunda licenses you’re not using, that’s sunk cost—it shouldn’t factor into your decision. What you care about is forward-looking spend. Document what you’ll spend next year if you stay, then model what you’d spend if you switched. The gap is your payback period. If it’s less than six months, you have a strong case.
document actual usage, calc per-workflow cost, then compare to execution-based pricing. most teams find switching pays back in under 6 months once u cut operational overhead.
I was in your exact position. We had Camunda licenses costing us around $80K annually, but we were only actively using about 40% of capacity. The overhead of maintaining it was brutal.
We switched to Latenode’s execution-based pricing and immediately got better visibility into actual spend. Instead of paying upfront for capacity we might use, we now pay $0.0019 per 30-second execution block. That sounds granular, but for our workflows it meant our annual spend dropped to about $18K, and we got better reliability and faster deployments.
The real win wasn’t just the cost savings though. We could actually see which workflows were expensive and optimize them. With Camunda, you’re already paying, so there’s no incentive to optimize. With execution-based billing, every inefficiency costs you real money.
You can model this yourself before committing. Run a trial and test your actual workflows against real execution costs. That’ll give you the numbers your finance team actually wants.