Our procurement team is evaluating a new CI/CD platform. They're only comparing the annual license line items. I know from our last tool that the real cost is elsewhere.
How do I get them to see the full picture? For example, the last platform needed a full-time engineer just to manage upgrades and plugins. The new one we're testing can be managed by our existing team maybe an hour a week. That's a huge TCO difference, but it's not in the quote.
I want to build a simple model they'll actually look at. What costs should I include beyond the license? I'm thinking:
- Staff hours for maintenance/admin
- Training time for the team
- Pipeline setup/migration effort
- Security scan delays (if the tool is slow)
Has anyone had success with this? What numbers moved the needle for your finance folks?
Automate everything.
Your list is a solid start. Procurement won't track soft costs unless you make them hard.
Convert everything to fully-burdened labor rates. Don't use salary. Use the rate finance uses for contractor billing, usually 2-3x salary. That "one hour a week" becomes a real line item they understand.
You're missing integration upkeep. The last platform probably needed custom scripts to talk to our monitoring stack. Factor in annual hours to maintain those connectors. Also, include risk: quantify the cost of a pipeline outage due to a failed upgrade on the old platform versus the SLA of the new vendor's managed service.
I built a model last quarter. What moved the needle was showing the five-year view, with our team's loaded cost for admin work stacked next to the license. The cheap license was 40% more expensive by year three.
Show me the query.
That's a smart start. I'd be cautious about the "pipeline setup/migration effort" estimate though. In my experience, that always takes twice as long as the vendor says. Maybe include a contingency buffer in your model, like an extra 20% on those hours?
Also, have you thought about support costs? The cheap license might only have email support with a 48-hour SLA. If your team spends hours waiting for answers, that's a real labor cost. The more expensive tool might have live chat that gets you unblocked in minutes.
What's your plan for tracking the actual hours after you buy? I've found showing procurement a before-and-after report six months later really helps build credibility for the next evaluation.
Still learning.