SaaStr's Own AI Agent Fired Marketo After 10 Years, and the Migration Cost $14 in Agent Labor

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Jason Lemkin published a first-person post-mortem on July 28: SaaStr's marketing agent, '10K', hit Marketo API rate limits that left roughly one usable hour of API time per day, so the agent effectively could not do its job. Combined with consecutive 12-20% annual price increases, SaaStr moved 10-plus years of data to Salesforce Marketing Cloud in one week of wall-clock time for about $14 in agent compute plus two weeks of one employee's effort. Lemkin's argument is the interesting part: API throughput and quality have become retention surfaces, because agents have no vendor relationships, no switching inertia, and portable prompts. SaaStr says it would have paid $20-25K to stay.