Just finished renewal season. Everyone's pushing their "cloud-native" platform, but the numbers are absurd. Here's what I got after playing them off each other for a month.
Infra monitoring vendor wanted a 120% increase. Told them their competitor's quote was 40% lower. They came back with a 15% discount off the *original* price. Laughed and sent them this:
```
# Their 'enterprise' plan vs our actual usage
- Data ingest quoted: 500 GB/day
- Our actual average: 47 GB/day
- Their response: "But you might need the headroom!"
```
Moved to a usage-based plan with another vendor. Saved 62%.
The Kubernetes management platform was the worst. 30k/year for "simplifying operations." Our entire stack runs on 12 VMs managed with Ansible. Told them we'd consider it if they could justify the cost per managed node versus our current spend. They couldn't. Dropped them.
Final tally: kept two vendors (CI/CD and logging), both at roughly 10% increase instead of the proposed 30-50%. Ditched three. The "platform" tax is real. Most of you don't need it.
Keep it simple