What is your stack
really costing you?

No one decides to spend six figures a year on software. It accumulates. A CRM to hold the pipeline. A support desk because customers started emailing. A marketing platform because the CRM’s built-in tools weren’t enough. A work manager because projects were slipping, a chat tool because email was drowning, an e-signature service, a scheduler, and then — the quiet tell of a stack in trouble — automation subscriptions whose only job is to make the other subscriptions talk to each other.

Each decision was reasonable. The sum is not. Nine categories, each billing monthly, each priced per seat, each renewing on its own schedule with its own escalation clause. The catalog behind the calculator above spans those nine categories, and composing one stack from it — one tool per category — lands between $730 and $3,670 a month for a starter team, climbs to $3,400–$14,000 for a growing one, and reaches $11,000–$43,000 a month at scale. That is $130,000 to over half a million dollars a year — for the rented version of a capability you could own.

The estimator above prices each tool at three team stages — starter, growing, and scaled— using rounded, team-level figures calibrated against vendors’ published tiers, or against typical quoted ranges where pricing is sales-quoted, as of September 2026. Pick your tools, pick the stage that matches your team, or type exact figures from your invoices; the meter totals monthly and annual spend in real time.

The savings band applies a 40–60% consolidation estimate to that total — the share of spend that stops existing when overlapping seats, connector subscriptions, and single-feature premium tiers collapse into one platform. It is shown as a band because it is an estimate, and every stack is different.

Just as important is what the calculator doesn’t count: implementation and onboarding fees, the administrator hours spent stitching tools together, usage overages, price escalations at renewal, and the cost of the data you can’t take with you when you leave. Every one of those pushes the true number higher. Treat the calculator’s output as your stack’s floor, not its ceiling.

The ranges below are drawn directly from this calculator’s catalog: for each category, the least and most expensive mainstream tool at each team stage, in team-level monthly terms. Your invoices will vary; the shape won’t.

A worked example: a growing team running Salesforce, HubSpot Marketing, Zendesk, Outreach, Asana, and Slack — a thoroughly ordinary six-tool core — sits at roughly $10,000 a month, $120,000 a year at typical pricing. The calculator’s consolidation band puts $48,000–$72,000 of that back on the table every year. Run your own basket above; the arithmetic is rarely kinder.

As enterprises rebuild around AI, the question isn’t whether your operation runs on software — it’s whether that transition leaves you owning your systems or renting them from an ever-growing stack of vendors. EIOS is our answer: the stack you rent today, refolded into one box you own — CRM and projects, phone and support with voice AI, billing, a retrieval engine over your own data, and Azura, a Claude-native pane of glass over all of it.

Compute included: rent dedicated GPUs by the whole card or the MIG slice from $0.13/hr — your models, zero data egress. We supply the horsepower; the box stays yours.

Benchmarks tell you what stacks cost; an audit tells you what yours does. It takes one afternoon, no consultants — and it converts the vague sense of “we pay for too many tools” into a list with dollar amounts and dates on it.

An honest cost page owes you the other column. Consolidation is a capability decision, not a religion — and there are stacks that should stay exactly where they are:

• A vertical instrument with no equal. When a specialized tool is the business — the EHR, the CAD seat, the trading terminal — keep the edge and consolidate the horizontal core around it.
• Certification mid-cycle. If a platform is load-bearing for a compliance audit in flight, finish the audit. Migrate on your calendar, not your auditor’s.
• A genuinely small stack. Three tools and a few hundred dollars a month: the savings are real but won’t clear the switching cost yet. Bookmark the math; grow first.
• Exit penalties that beat the savings. Mid-term contracts can cost more to leave than to finish — that’s what the renewal calendar from your audit is for. Time the move; don’t force it.
• No owner for the transition. A migration nobody owns becomes the tenth subscription: paid for, half-adopted, resented. Name an owner, or wait until you can.

Everything else — the CRM, the support desk, the project boards, and the connectors taped between them — is the horizontal core, and the horizontal core is exactly what one owned platform replaces.