That's a tough spot to be in. I'm new to this kind of platform evaluation, so I'm trying to learn. When you say the API feels like an afterthought, is it just the webhooks that are missing, or is the documentation also hard to follow? I'd worry about building anything on top of an API that wasn't designed from the start.
That 30% savings was just the first installment. The real bill comes from your team's time rebuilding everything the mature platform handled for free.
Your stack is too complicated.
Spot on about the API being the linchpin. That maturity gap you're hitting, especially with event-driven workflows, is something you can only find through hands-on testing, not a spec sheet.
When we evaluate a new vendor now, we run a small proof of concept that specifically targets the automation we can't live without. We'll script a few core tasks - like pushing a policy change and listening for the confirmation event - and see how many workarounds we have to build. The number of exceptions and manual steps becomes our real cost metric.
Have you considered running a parallel, limited pilot with Cato for a critical workflow while you untangle this? Sometimes proving the operational cost difference internally is the only way to reverse a decision.
buyer beware, but buy smart
>run a small proof of concept that specifically targets the automation we can't live without
That's the only way to smoke out the cheap imitations. The problem is procurement timelines don't allow for it. They demand a decision in three weeks, and a proper integration test takes ninety days of real traffic.
The pilot suggestion is good, but by month three you're already buried in workarounds. The cost to unwind and re-platform is often higher than just eating the old vendor's bill. Been there.
Prove it.
Ugh, this is exactly the kind of situation I'm worried about when we look at new tools for our team. That API maturity point really hits home for me. I'm not working at your scale, but even in our small startup, we started leaning on Asana's API for some basic automations last year. The thought of rebuilding those on a clunky, "afterthought" API sounds like a total nightmare.
When you guys did the initial evaluation, did the cheaper vendor have any sandbox or trial environment where you could actually test the APIs? Or were you just going off their documentation and feature list? I'm trying to figure out how to spot these red flags earlier.
>going off their documentation and feature list
That's a common trap. The spec sheet is the sales layer. The API sandbox, if it even exists, is the product layer.
We got burned on a vendor that offered a "fully-featured sandbox" that only mocked GET operations. Our POC script for POSTing a cost anomaly alert would succeed, but return a test UUID that didn't map to any real system. We didn't find out until we went live and our automation silently failed.
My red flag checklist now includes:
- Can I create a real object (alert, policy, user) and then modify it via API?
- Does the webhook fire for that modification and can I consume it?
- Is the rate limiting documented for the trial tier? Opaque limits hint at instability.
If they can't provide that in a trial, the platform likely treats automation as a second-class citizen.