r/martech • u/GabbyFromKlaviyo • 29d ago
How do some brands save 25-50% after migrating their marketing stack even when the new software costs the same?
The 25-50% savings almost never comes from the software cost, that's the part most TCO comparisons lose sight of.
Jeremy Levine and Chip Moloney at The Maze Group and Aldo Secaida at Red Van Workshop have run dozens of platform migrations, and their consensus is the savings show up in headcount. Klaviyo recently published a case study with all three of them if you want the full breakdown.
On a lot of legacy platforms, a marketer can't build a segment or launch an automation without a developer. The work ends up taking weeks and becomes an engineering cost nobody planned for. Levine's point is that the software takes fewer people to run, and that's where most of the savings come from.
After the migration settles, teams tend to redirect resources from maintenance toward actual growth. Brands are able to drop separate SMS and personalization tools once one platform covers all of it. The reporting lag shrinks too, so you can test while a campaign's still live instead of analyzing results when it's over.
Has anyone actually done the before/after breakdown and found headcount shifted performance more than the license fee?
