What is your stack actually costing you?
Licences are the line everyone negotiates, and the smallest of the five. This is the open model from our integration tax post with every assumption left editable. Put your own numbers in and the conclusion usually holds: the connective cost exceeds the licence cost.
Where these numbers come from.
Every default here is an assumption stated openly in our write-up, not a figure chosen to flatter the argument. At those defaults the model lands on about $9,240 a month, roughly $111,000 a year, of which licences are under a third.
The two lines most worth arguing with are the administration of the seams and the time lost to reconciliation. In our experience both are more often set too low than too high.
Read the full model- CRM40
- Wiki and docs40
- Project management30
- Helpdesk12
- Finance and invoicing6
Not everyone needs every seat128 seats
Common questions
Is this based on a survey?
No. It is an open model with every assumption editable, which is why they are all on this page rather than behind it. Change any of them and the arithmetic changes in front of you.
Does consolidating really remove these lines?
Not all of them. Connective software goes to zero because there are no seams to bridge. Administration collapses to ordinary administration. Reconciliation shrinks to ordinary human error rather than disappearing. AI changes character: one layer across everything rather than an add-on per silo. Licences do not vanish; they become one line instead of five.
What is the cost this model cannot show?
The questions nobody asks. “Which accounts are at risk this quarter, and why?” needs pipeline, tickets, delivery status and invoices together. In a five-tool stack that is a project, so it happens quarterly at best, usually after something has already gone wrong.
Five licences become one.
Sales, support, docs, projects and finance on one set of records, for one price per seat. Founding members lock in today’s price.
