Swapping Corvettes for Civics
Company: Series D Enterprise SaaS
Vendor: PagerDuty
Savings: $82K in Year 1, ~$102K annually thereafter
When we began working with this Series D enterprise SaaS company, we spotted a common pattern: they’d bought best-in-class tools across every category — “Corvettes” everywhere — but many were only being used for short commutes.
Case in point: PagerDuty.
Incident management is critical, but the company was paying $121K/year for what functionally acted as an automated phone tree.
The Playbook (5 months before renewal):
Collected competitive bids from FireHydrant and Grafana IRM
Modeled transition costs and operational impact
Presented two options:
• Stay with PagerDuty → negotiated down to $71K
• Switch vendors → $15–20K/year + $20K one-time migration
The client chose FireHydrant, saving $82K in the first year and roughly $102K per year thereafter (“receipts” available upon request).
They kept the Corvettes that mattered — and replaced the rest with Civics that got the job done.
