How we quantified SaaS Lock-In and LLM Costs

Source: Dev.to

Vendor Lock‑In Score

The “Contact Sales” button is a technical‑debt indicator. Every time a vendor hides its pricing behind a form, it adds friction to your stack’s scalability.

We spent months building a pipeline that tracks hundreds of SaaS pricing pages daily. Raw data is just noise, so we created a dashboard that treats software procurement like engineering: with logic, formulas, and daily data pipelines.

How we measure lock‑in

• Data Portability – Does the API allow full bulk exports?
• Integration Depth – How many proprietary hooks are you forced to use?
• Contractual Friction – Auto‑renewal clauses and seat minimums.

The logic: If a tool scores 8/10 on lock‑in, a “cheap” $50 /mo starter plan is actually a high‑risk liability. We’ve mapped this for hundreds of tools (on track to exceed 1,000) so you can see the trap before you step into it.

Stack Builder – “Infrastructure as a Budget”

Procurement usually happens in a messy Excel sheet that quickly breaks and never stays updated.

Our Stack Builder solves this by:

• Letting you select tools across 28+ growing categories (CRMs, hosting, security, etc.).
• Pulling daily‑synced prices (no more stale data).
• Calculating total monthly and annual burn, accounting for per‑seat vs. flat‑rate scaling.

It acts as a sandbox for your CFO: swap a $200 /mo CRM for a $50 /mo alternative and instantly see the ripple effect on your total stack cost.

LLM Calculator

LLM pricing is a moving target. With six providers and 25+ models (from GPT‑4o to Llama 3 on Groq), calculating token costs for a production app is a nightmare.

Our LLM Calculator normalizes this: input your expected monthly tokens (input / output) and it returns a side‑by‑side cost comparison.

Why it matters

• Switching providers for the same model can save up to 40 % in margins.
• Daily sync catches “stealth” price drops the moment they hit the docs.

Open Data

Everything we do is open:

• GitHub – Fork the logic.
• Kaggle – Use the raw SQLite/CSV dumps for your own models.
• Railway API – Public endpoints (no auth required) to pipe prices directly into internal tools.

We are building a public utility. Software is the biggest line item for modern companies after payroll; it shouldn’t be a black box.

• Try the dashboard:
• Code & data:

No “Contact Sales” buttons were harmed in the making of this project.