The Hidden Cost of Low-Code Integration Platforms

The enterprise iPaaS market is a $10B+ industry. The leading platforms — MuleSoft, Boomi, Workato — charge between $50K and $500K+ per year. What do you actually get for that?

More importantly: what do you pay for that you didn’t expect?

This post breaks down the real total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprise integration platforms, using the most common pricing models in the market. The numbers come from public pricing pages, customer interviews, and our own experience evaluating these platforms as buyers.

The Sticker Price vs. The Real Price

Let’s start with what the sales deck shows:

Platform	Published Starting Price	Typical Mid-Market Contract
MuleSoft Anypoint	~$50K/year (limited vCores)	$150K-$500K/year
Boomi	~$50K/year (base)	$100K-$300K/year
Workato	~$30K/year (recipes)	$60K-$150K/year
Informatica Cloud	”Contact sales”	$100K-$400K/year

The gap between the starting price and the typical contract is where the hidden costs live.

Hidden Cost #1: Per-Connector Pricing

MuleSoft’s Anypoint Connectors are split into tiers. Core connectors (HTTP, JDBC, FTP) are included. Premium connectors (Salesforce, SAP, Workday) cost extra — sometimes significantly extra.

For a mid-market company connecting 15-20 SaaS tools:

5-8 premium connectors needed
Each connector: $5K-$15K/year incremental
Annual connector tax: $40K-$100K on top of the base platform fee

The connector pricing model has a perverse incentive: the platform benefits from having more connectors in the catalog, not from making integrations easy. A $10K/year SAP connector is a revenue line. A generic HTTP adapter that lets you connect to any API is a revenue loss.

Hidden Cost #2: Capacity-Based Pricing Traps

Most enterprise iPaaS platforms price on some unit of capacity:

MuleSoft: vCores (compute units). Base plan includes 1-2 vCores. Production workloads need 4-8+.
Boomi: Connections (source-target pairs). Each unique pair counts.
Workato: Recipes (integration flows) and tasks (executions).

The trap: your capacity needs are unpredictable. A new business requirement adds 10 integrations overnight. An API that was polled daily now needs to be polled every minute. A seasonal traffic spike pushes you past your task limit.

Overage pricing is where the economics get painful:

Base plan:           100K tasks/month at $30K/year
Actual usage:        250K tasks/month
Overage rate:        $0.05/task
Monthly overage:     150K × $0.05 = $7,500
Annual overage:      $90,000
Effective annual:    $120,000 (4x the sticker price)

This isn’t hypothetical. We’ve seen companies triple their integration spend within 12 months because their usage patterns didn’t fit the tiered pricing model.

Hidden Cost #3: Professional Services

Enterprise iPaaS platforms are complex. The same flexibility that enables Fortune 500 use cases creates a learning curve that most mid-market teams can’t absorb without help.

Professional services typically include:

Service	Cost Range	Frequency
Initial implementation	$50K-$200K	One-time
Custom connector development	$15K-$50K per connector	Per connector
Training (team of 5-8)	$10K-$30K	Annual
Architecture review	$20K-$50K	Annual
”Health check” assessments	$10K-$25K	Quarterly
Migration assistance	$30K-$100K	One-time

For a mid-market company in year one:

Platform license:        $100,000
Professional services:   $120,000
Internal engineering:     $80,000 (2 engineers × 3 months ramp-up)
Total year one:          $300,000

That’s 3x the license cost in adjacent spend.

Hidden Cost #4: The Engineer Tax

This is the cost nobody puts in a spreadsheet: the engineering time consumed by the platform itself.

Every enterprise iPaaS has:

A proprietary expression language to learn
A deployment model to understand
An error handling paradigm to internalize
Platform-specific debugging workflows
Vendor-specific security and credential management

We’ve tracked the engineering overhead across multiple integration teams:

Activity	Hours/Month	Cost at $150K/year
Platform maintenance/updates	16-24 hrs	$1,500-$2,250
Debugging platform-specific issues	12-20 hrs	$1,125-$1,875
Managing credentials/connections	8-12 hrs	$750-$1,125
Platform training for new team members	8-16 hrs	$750-$1,500
Vendor communication/support tickets	4-8 hrs	$375-$750
Monthly total	48-80 hrs	$4,500-$7,500
Annual total	576-960 hrs	$54,000-$90,000

That’s a half to full FTE spent operating the platform, not building integrations.

Hidden Cost #5: Vendor Lock-In Premium

Lock-in isn’t a cost you pay today. It’s a cost you pay when you need to leave.

After 2-3 years on an enterprise iPaaS, you typically have:

50-200 integration flows in a proprietary format
Business logic embedded in platform-specific constructs
Credentials managed by the platform’s vault
Monitoring and alerting tied to the platform’s dashboards
Institutional knowledge that’s platform-specific

Migration cost estimate:

Audit existing integrations:          $15K-$30K
Rewrite flows on new platform:        $500-$2,000 per flow
Migrate credentials and connections:  $10K-$20K
Parallel running period (3-6 months): $50K-$100K (double licensing)
Re-training team:                     $15K-$30K
Total migration (100 flows):         $140K-$330K

This is the hidden leverage the vendor has in every renewal negotiation. They know you can’t leave easily, and they price accordingly. Year-over-year price increases of 10-20% are standard for locked-in customers.

The Real TCO: A Three-Year View

Let’s put it all together for a mid-market company (200 employees, 50 integrations, growing 20%/year):

Traditional Enterprise iPaaS

Cost	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
Platform license	$100K	$115K	$130K
Connector premiums	$60K	$75K	$90K
Capacity overage	$0	$30K	$60K
Professional services	$120K	$30K	$30K
Engineer tax	$70K	$70K	$70K
Annual total	$350K	$320K	$380K
Three-year TCO			$1,050,000

That $50K/year starting price became a million-dollar commitment.

Usage-Based AI-Native Platform

Cost	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
Platform (usage-based)	$24K	$36K	$48K
No connector premiums	$0	$0	$0
No professional services needed	$0	$0	$0
Reduced engineer tax	$20K	$20K	$20K
Annual total	$44K	$56K	$68K
Three-year TCO			$168,000

The difference: $882,000 over three years. That’s not a rounding error — it’s 5-6 engineers.

How to Avoid the Trap

When evaluating integration platforms, demand answers to these questions:

“Show me the total cost for 50 integrations, 500K executions/month, connecting to 20 SaaS tools.” Not the starting price. The actual price at your scale.
“What happens when I exceed my plan limits?” Get overage pricing in writing before you sign.
“How many of your connectors are premium vs. included?” List the specific tools you use and get a quote for all of them.
“What’s the total professional services spend for your average mid-market customer in year one?” If they won’t answer, assume it’s more than the license.
“Can I export all my integration definitions in a portable format?” If not, you’re building on quicksand.
“What does a typical renewal look like?” Ask for the average year-over-year price increase for existing customers.

The Better Model

Transparent pricing looks like this:

Published prices. On the website. No “contact sales” gates.
Usage-based scaling. Pay for what you execute, not for capacity you might need.
No connector tax. An API is an API. You shouldn’t pay extra to connect to Salesforce vs. a generic REST endpoint.
Config-as-code. Your integrations live in your repo, not the vendor’s database. Walking away costs a rewrite of configs, not a hostage negotiation.
Self-serve onboarding. If the platform requires $100K in professional services to get started, that’s a product problem, not a customer problem.

Integration is infrastructure. It should be priced like infrastructure — transparently, predictably, and proportionally to what you use.