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Fivetran Published the Full Cost of Replacing a $65K SaaS Product With Agents, and Production Hardening Was 56% of It
Fivetran replaced Atlassian Statuspage, which cost roughly $65,000 a year driven by ~26,000 billable notification subscribers, with an in-house build: 52 hours of requirements, 88 hours of spec prep for agents, 160 hours of agent tooling and orchestration, 162 hours of MVP, and 537 hours of production hardening. Total was ~1,050 hours across two engineers over four months, about $109,500 including only ~$4,500 in AI tokens, against forecast operating costs of $12,400 to $25,000 a year. This is the honest version of the build-versus-buy story: the payback is real by year two, but hardening cost more than requirements, the agent harness and the entire MVP combined.
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