Unpopular opinion: The whole 'family' of runtimes is just a way to upsell you.

Just finished a 30-day trial for a major workflow automation platform. The pricing page is a maze of "runtimes": workflow runtime, bot runtime, AI runtime, integration runtime.

It feels less like a technical necessity and more like a clever billing lever. Need to scale one part of your process? That's a separate runtime bucket with its own overages. Suddenly your predictable bill isn't.

My theory: they unbundle the core engine into these "family" members so they can charge you multiple times for what feels like the same compute. You're not just buying a platform, you're renting a series of toll roads.

Anyone else hit by surprise overages because of how a 'runtime' was defined in their contract? Especially around AI or bot steps.