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What is your fragmented stack actually costing you?

The subscriptions are the small number. The expensive part is the work that exists only because your tools don't talk to each other - copying data across systems, reconciling what doesn't match, fixing automations that failed quietly, and waiting on changes nobody owns. This estimates both, and shows you the ratio between them.

Used only to pre-fill the sliders below with a rough starting point - every one of them is yours to correct. Adjusted sliders are never overwritten.

Count the middle layer only: your spreadsheet or database tool, automation tool, forms or booking tool, portal or approvals tool, internal trackers. Leave out accounting, payroll and marketing suites - those aren't the fragmentation problem.

Salary plus overhead, per hour. Ops or admin staff are often $35-60; a founder's hour is worth considerably more.

Copying, re-entering, exporting and re-uploading. The work that exists only because system A can't see system B.

Chasing why two systems disagree, hunting the record that didn't sync, rebuilding a report because the numbers didn't tie.

An automation stopped and nobody noticed for days. Include the fixing and the clean-up, not just the fix.

Rebuilding a workflow when the process changes, re-doing a form, waiting on whoever set it up originally. Count the waiting.

Your stack costs about $0/month

That's $0 a year

Subscriptions$0
The work around them$0

How this is calculated: team size only seeds the starting values (roughly 0.6 hours a week of data-shuffling per person, and proportionally less for the other three) - it is a starting point, not a finding, and it never multiplies your own numbers. Weekly hours are multiplied by 4.33 to get a month. All four time inputs are added and priced at your hourly cost, then added to subscriptions. Nothing is inflated and no multiplier is applied - if anything this is conservative, because it excludes the cost of decisions delayed by numbers nobody trusts, and of the work people quietly stop doing because it's too annoying.

What would one system cost instead?

Fair question, and the honest answer needs one number from you rather than from us. Consolidating the middle layer removes the seams between those tools - the copying, the reconciling, the automations breaking between systems. It does not remove everything: you still connect accounting and payroll, someone still checks things, and some of that time simply moves rather than disappears. We launch in January 2027 and have no customer data to quote a savings figure from, so we are not going to invent one. Set the assumption yourself:

Your call, not our claim. Zero means you believe consolidation changes nothing. 100% would mean every hour of copying, reconciling and fixing vanishes, which is not realistic - the honest range is somewhere in the middle.

On one system, at your own assumption

$0/month

Chromoly subscription$0
Work that remains$0
What this assumes: the operational tools you counted at the top are replaced by one system, so that subscription line becomes a Chromoly plan. Specialist tools - accounting, payroll, marketing - stay where they are and connect, so they were never in the number. The remaining work is whatever you decided does not go away. The suggested plan is based on your team size and is an indication, not a quote; see the full pricing.

Why the second bar is usually the bigger one

Every tool you add is one more place data lives, and the cost isn't the subscription - it's the seam. Two systems that both hold customer records create reconciliation work forever. An automation stitching them together creates a thing that can fail silently, which it eventually will. And a process spread across four tools can't be changed in one place, so changes get postponed until the workaround becomes permanent.

This is why cutting subscriptions rarely helps much. You remove $80 a month and keep all the copying. The number that moves is the second bar, and it only moves when the seams go away.

What to do with the number

Frequently asked questions

What does a fragmented stack actually cost?

The subscription line is usually the smallest part. A ten-person business often pays a few hundred a month for the operational middle layer and several times that in the work around it - copying, reconciling, fixing quiet failures, and waiting on changes.

How is the hidden cost calculated?

Four measurable activities priced at your loaded hourly cost: moving data between tools, reconciling mismatches, recovering from silent breakages, and changing how the tools work. All of it is time someone already spends - it just isn't on an invoice.

Is consolidating always cheaper?

No. Consolidation helps for the operational middle layer, where tools pass data to each other. Specialist tools like accounting and payroll should stay and be connected instead.

Why does team size change the numbers?

It doesn't - it only pre-fills the sliders so you're not staring at a blank form. Team size is never used as a multiplier on your own figures, and once you adjust a slider it stays where you put it.

Does this send my numbers anywhere?

No. It runs entirely in your browser - nothing submitted, nothing stored, no email gate. Close the tab and the numbers are gone.

The second bar is the one we remove

One system instead of the seams between five. Describe what your business does in plain language and see it built - free tier, no credit card.

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