// COST COMPARISON
One layer instead of five line items.
ORiON does not replace your ERP, your CRM or your payroll system — you'd keep paying for those either way. What it replaces is the expensive scaffolding that grew up around them: the BI seats, the automation tools, the internal dashboards, and the hours someone spends every month gluing it together by hand.
// THE STACK AROUND YOUR STACK
- BI & visualizationTableau · Power BI · Lookerper seat
- Automation & glueZapier · n8n · Makeper task
- Internal toolingRetool · custom dashboardsbuild + maintain
- Point-solution modulesVendor add-ons, one per systemper module
- Analyst timeAssembling the same reports monthlyheadcount
// WITH ORiON
- ✓Dashboards and reports built by asking — no BI seats to license
- ✓Agents replace the automation glue, and explain what they did
- ✓Nothing to build in-house, and nothing to keep alive afterwards
- ✓One layer across every system, not a module per vendor
- ✓The recurring reports run themselves, on a schedule
// WHERE THE MONEY ACTUALLY GOES
The licence fee is rarely the expensive part.
Four costs that don't appear on any invoice, and usually dwarf the ones that do.
Seats for people who just need to look
Per-seat BI pricing means the people who most need the number — a department head who checks it twice a month — are the ones you can least justify licensing. So they ask someone else instead, and that someone else becomes the bottleneck.
The report nobody wants to own
Every operations team has a monthly pack that takes a competent person a day or two to assemble from exports. That is real salary, spent on copying numbers between spreadsheets, every month, forever.
Automations only one person understands
The zap chain that quietly holds a process together, built by someone who has since left. It breaks when a field is renamed, and the cost lands as an outage rather than a line item.
Decisions made a week late
The hardest cost to put a number against, and usually the largest. When the answer takes four days to assemble, the decision waits four days — or gets made without it.
// BE FAIR ABOUT IT
What ORiON doesn't replace.
A cost comparison that claims to replace everything isn't a comparison, it's a pitch. Here's the honest version of where ORiON does and doesn't take a line off your budget.
Your ERP, CRM or payroll system
These stay, and so does their cost. ORiON needs them to be the systems of record.
A dedicated data warehouse, if you have one
If you've already built a warehouse for regulated reporting, keep it. ORiON is for the operating questions, not your audit trail.
Most BI seats
If the seats exist so people can read operating dashboards, ORiON covers that without per-seat licensing.
The automation layer between systems
Agents handle the multi-step work, and unlike a zap chain they can explain what they did and why.
Vendor reporting add-ons
The analytics module each vendor sells on top of their own product, priced per system and blind to every other one.
// BEFORE THE CALL
Five things to add up.
Bring these numbers and the conversation takes fifteen minutes instead of three meetings. We'd rather you arrive knowing whether this is worth it.
Annual spend on BI and visualization tools, and how many seats actually get used.
Spend on automation and integration tooling, including anything on a corporate card.
Reporting add-ons you pay your ERP, CRM and payroll vendors for, separately.
Hours per month your team spends assembling recurring reports by hand.
The one question you'd most like answered on demand, and what waiting costs you.
// RUN THE NUMBERS WITH US