u/Wonderful-Reserve832

Going through renewals for next year's budget and it's the same list as always: three tools that all do some version of reporting, a $60K/year platform renewal nobody's fully using, and what would actually break if we don't renew.

Our head of ops keeps asking why we're paying for some of this when we could probably just build a lightweight version in-house using Claude, since our one technical hire can apparently spin up something functional in a couple weeks. I don't have a good answer. I can't tell if that's a real option or if we'd be trading a known cost for a maintenance headache nobody's priced out. So now every renewal conversation has this extra question hanging over it that we didn't used to have to answer.

Anyone actually gone through this calculation seriously? Curious what made you decide to keep paying vs. build it yourselves and what was the impact of it.

Going through renewals for next year's budget and it's the same list as always: three tools that all do some version of reporting, a $60K/year platform renewal nobody's fully using, and what would actually break if we don't renew.

New wrinkle this year: our head of ops keeps asking why we're paying for some of this when we could probably just build a lightweight version in-house using Claude, since our one technical hire can apparently spin up something functional in a couple weeks. I don't have a good answer. I can't tell if that's a real option or if we'd be trading a known cost for a maintenance headache nobody's priced out. So now every renewal conversation has this extra question hanging over it that we didn't used to have to answer.

Anyone actually gone through this calculation seriously? Curious what made you decide to keep paying vs. build it yourselves and what was the impact of it.

We're mid-renewal on a platform that costs us close to $400K a year. I asked around to understand the original reasoning, since renewal is a good moment to check if it's still the right call. Turns out the person who ran that evaluation left the company in 2023. There's no writeup, no comparison doc, nothing in Confluence beyond a one-line ticket saying "approved." Two people who sat in on the vendor demos vaguely remember there was a cheaper option that got ruled out, but not why. So we're stuck either renewing blind or re-running a full evaluation from scratch, on a system we've already built two years of workflows around. How does your org handle this when the person who made the call is gone? Is there an actual process, or does it just get relitigated from zero every time?