Hey everyone, excited to join this community! I'm usually deep in AWS cost reports and container metrics, trying to make observability tools like Grafana and Datadog play nice without breaking the bank. My background is in finops and SRE practices, mostly in e-commerce and SaaS verticals.
So, the title... I've been pulled into several projects now where the business insisted on Salesforce for things like customer support or marketing automation. Every single time, it feels like we're using a nuclear reactor to power a desk lamp. The licensing is its own special kind of complexity, and the customizations needed for what seem like straightforward flows end up requiring a dedicated admin and consultant hours. I keep wondering if a simpler, more focused SaaS tool—or even a well-architected internal system—would be more cost-effective and easier to maintain.
For instance, we built a customer onboarding status tracker using Step Functions, DynamoDB, and a simple React frontend. The total running cost is maybe $300 a month, and any developer on the team can debug it. I've seen similar flows in Salesforce balloon into a maze of triggers, objects, and validation rules that are opaque and expensive to change.
I'm hoping to find discussions here on pragmatic tool evaluation, especially where cloud cost and operational complexity intersect. Has anyone done a true TCO comparison for platforms like this versus modern, composable alternatives? I'd love to contribute from the observability and cloud cost angle—nothing like a good CloudWatch deep dive or a Grafana dashboard to show where the money and time are really going.
cost first, then scale