What a six-tool software stack actually costs.

“Replace your whole stack” is a claim every consolidated platform makes, including ours. It is usually asserted rather than shown. So we priced a specific, ordinary stack against vendors' own published pages and wrote down what we found.

The scenario, stated precisely

Vague comparisons are worthless, because SaaS pricing bends sharply on two or three variables. So: a five-person business with 2,500 marketing contacts, running six common tools. All prices are the vendor's own published list price for an EU customer, checked on 20 August 2026, excluding VAT. Where a vendor publishes euro prices we use those; where it does not, we say so.

Sources: vendor pricing pages for Mailchimp, Calendly, Intercom, Typeform, Hootsuite and Zapier, read 20 August 2026. Intercom publishes no euro price list, so it is shown separately in dollars rather than converted. Hootsuite publishes only an annual rate; it confirms month-to-month billing exists at a higher rate but does not print the number.

The finding: it is not about the number of tools

The instinctive framing is “too many subscriptions”. The data says otherwise. Of the €769.49 in euro-priced tools, €555 — 72% — sits on lines that scale with headcount rather than usage. Hootsuite alone is 64% of the entire euro bill. Intercom, priced in dollars, is per-seat too.

That reframes the decision. Cancelling the €53 email tool is housekeeping. The structural question is how many products in your stack charge you again every time you hire someone — because those are the ones whose cost curve bends against you exactly when the business is going well.

What the sticker price hides

Four of the six carry a pricing mechanic that is not visible in the headline number.

Intercom charges per seat and per outcome

The seat price is roughly half the story. Its Fin AI agent is billed “from $0.99 per outcome”, charged per resolved conversation. That makes the true monthly cost a function of your support volume, which you cannot know before you sign. It is a defensible model — you pay for work done — but it is not budgetable in the way a seat price is.

Mailchimp steps rather than slopes

Pricing moves in contact bands: 0–500, 501–1,500, 1,501–2,500, 2,501–5,000. Growing from 2,499 to 2,501 contacts moves you a whole tier. Worth knowing before an import.

Zapier bundles users into the plan, not the price

Professional is €43.31/month annually at 2,000 tasks — but includes a single user. Five people need the Team plan, which is why the table shows €60.99 rather than €43.31. A per-seat charge in disguise.

Hootsuite prices in euros at the dollar numeral

Standard is $99 per user in the US and €99 per user in the EU. Not a conversion — the same digits. At August 2026 exchange rates, European customers pay a meaningful premium for the identical product.

Paying annually is worth about 8%

Moving every eligible line to annual billing takes the euro subtotal from €769.49 to €707.99 — €61.50 a month, or roughly 8%. Less than the “save up to 33%” banners imply, because the two largest lines barely move: Hootsuite publishes only an annual rate, and Mailchimp offers no annual prepay at this tier.

Annual commitments also trade flexibility for that 8%. If you are still deciding whether a tool earns its place, the discount is not the deciding factor.

When consolidation pays — and when it does not

We sell a consolidated platform, so treat the next paragraph with appropriate suspicion and check it against your own numbers.

Pandora CRM starts at €49/month and covers email campaigns, booking, forms, unified messaging, social publishing and workflow automation on one customer record. Against the €769.49 scenario above, that is a large gap. Our own product pages quote savings of up to €1,340/month; that figure comes from a specific twelve-store retail configuration and is higher than this five-person scenario produces. Both numbers are scenario-dependent, which is rather the point — anyone quoting you a single universal saving is guessing.

Consolidation is the wrong move when:

• One tool is load-bearing at a depth a suite will not match. If your growth depends on advanced social listening, a general platform's publishing module is a downgrade, whatever it saves.
• The switching cost lands on the wrong team. Migration is real work. A €700/month saving that costs three weeks of your operations lead is not obviously a win in the first year.
• You are mid-contract. Annual commitments you have already paid for are sunk. Consolidate at renewal, not before.
• The integration is the value. If Zapier is holding together something genuinely custom, replacing it with a suite's built-in automation may cost more in rebuilt workflows than it saves in subscription.

The honest summary: consolidation pays when the tools are generic and per-seat, and pays poorly when they are specialist and usage-priced. In the stack above, that points clearly at the two largest lines and leaves the €53 email tool roughly where it is.