Five tools quietly replacing your $400k MarTech stack, and what they cost
What a leaner mid-market stack actually looks like. Honest pricing, real switching costs, no vendor sponsorships.
Mid-market consolidation is visible in list pricing: replacing a suite plus service contract with five well-chosen tools removes both seats and retainer. We are not publishing before/after spend figures, because we have no documented set of them.
The five tools showing up most often: a workflow runtime (Make or n8n self-hosted), a typed data layer (a single Postgres + dbt), a single LLM gateway (with usage caps per team), a vector store collocated with the data layer, and a lightweight CDP that does identity resolution but not orchestration.
What's notably absent: the all-in-one suites. Not because they're bad, but because the integration tax of one suite locks the team into that suite's roadmap. The unbundled stack moves at the team's pace.
Switching cost is real: plan on running the old and new stacks in parallel for a stretch of weeks before retiring anything.
The stack didn't get cheaper because the vendors got cheaper. It got cheaper because one operator with five well-chosen tools replaced four seats and a service contract.
- 01The consolidation case is about removing seats and retainers, not shaving licence fees.
- 02Workflow runtime + typed data layer + LLM gateway is the spine.
- 03Avoid all-in-one suites; unbundled moves at your pace.
- 04Budget a parallel-running period before retiring the old stack.
- Published
- May 24, 2026
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