How to Calculate ROI for Integration Platforms
Everyone knows integrations have value. Few people actually know how to measure that value. “They save time” is technically correct, but not accurate enough to make a business case or properly evaluate your needs. Whether you need to secure budget, build a business case, or help leadership decide which integration method to try, you need a way to calculate the ROI you’ll get from software integration. That means correctly identifying the variables at play, knowing how to calculate them, and putting them into a single formula to get a clear ROI.
Here’s how.
Why integration ROI is hard to quantify
Most of the costs you pay for not having an integration platform are invisible. No project manager tracks the amount of time their teams spend manually transferring data back and forth between tools, even when those costs start to add up. Context switching, the psychological impact of switching between tasks, inflates the time and effort needed to complete a project. After a single switch, it can take 25 minutes to get your focus back. When that switch happens multiple times a day, a task that should only take a couple of hours can easily take half your workday or more.
Many organizations end up building their own custom integrations to bring this cost down. But while the costs paid for your developers (or external consultants) to build custom integrations are tracked and budgeted for, they’re not considered as a cost in the projects they affect. That means you don’t get full visibility on what an integration platform is actually worth.
But the difficulty isn’t just in measuring costs. The benefits of an integration platform aren’t easy to track broadly. An individual collaborator might be able to say they save an hour a day with an integration, or that not being frustrated with content data transfers allows them to focus more effectively on a project. But unless you deliberately measure these elements widely, calculating the ROI of an integration platform will be unnecessarily challenging.
There are three main variables you should measure to determine the costs you’re paying for not having a dedicated integration platform and the savings you’ll get from deploying one:
- The time your teams spend manually transferring data back and forth between tools (or using other workarounds).
- The licenses you can eliminate when individual contributors don’t need to work in multiple tools.
- The technical resources you’ll save from not having to build or maintain your own integrations.
Here’s a full breakdown of how to measure these variables and integrate them into a broader ROI calculation.
Integration cost category 1: Time
Integrations save your team time they would otherwise spend on manual work, from copying and pasting data over to sharing status updates across multiple, disconnected tools. That sort of administrative work is so common that most teams don’t realize it’s a cost they’re paying on most projects. Here’s how you can calculate the amount of time (and money) an integration can save you.
| Hours per week spent on manual work x Fully-loaded hourly rate x 52 = Annual time cost |
By fully-loaded annual rate, we mean a rate that includes benefits, overhead, and similar costs. As for the amount of time spent per week on manual work, you can use one of the following three categories:
- Light manual work: Small teams using one to two tools. Estimate at two to five hours per person, per week.
- Moderate: Cross-functional projects using three to five tools. Estimate five to 10 hours per person, per week.
- Heavy: Six tools and more, for projects with regular status reports. Estimate 10 to 15 hours per person, per week.
Here’s an example of what that cost looks like in practice. A 12-person ops team coordinates work between a Jira project and an Asana project, using Smartsheet to report on what’s happening in these tools. That work involves six hours of copying and pasting per person. Assume an average $75/hr fully-loaded rate for each team member. Here’s what that cost averages out to annually.
6 x 12 = 72 hours of manual work a week
72 x 75 = $5,400 per week
5,400 x 52 = $280,800 per year
Integration cost category 2: Licenses
While organizations have improved license utilization from 47% in 2024 to 54.4% in 2025, according to Zylo data, there’s still a significant amount of waste across most organizations. When teams work across multiple tools, some collaborators need licenses for tools that are essential to their workflows but not their day-to-day work. That might be because they need to copy and paste information between these tools, access specific reports, or check in on work for another team.
Here’s how you can calculate the cost of unused or underused licenses.
| Number of employees with dual licenses x Cost per seat per year = Annual license savings |
Now here’s a common scenario where you’re likely to double up on licenses and where an integration can meaningfully reduce costs.
Project managers need to access both Jira for software engineering projects and Asana when working with business teams. Eight project managers do this back and forth over and over again, when half could probably stay in Jira, while the other half could stay in Asana. That means you could eliminate a net eight licenses.
8 licenses x $300 = $2,400
Integration cost category 3: Technical resources
When you don’t have a dedicated integration platform that business users can leverage, every integration needs technical resources. Whether you have in-house developers build it from scratch, third-party consultants build it for you, or you use a more complex integration platform that still requires custom development.
Building integrations isn’t the only time you have to use these resources, though. There’s also maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting.
You can use one of two formulas to calculate these costs, for internal technical resources and outsourced resources.
| # of technical resources used x time per year spent managing integration x fully-loaded hourly rate + overhead multiplier = Cost of internal resources |
Here’s what each variable in this formula means:
- # of technical resources used: The number of employees involved in building, maintaining, or troubleshooting integrations.
- Time per year spent managing integrations: A light integration might require 80 to 120 hours to manage. An integration with custom API work might take 200-400 hours a year.
- Hourly rate: This needs to be a fully-loaded rate, including all forms of compensation, not just salary.
- Overhead multiplier: This covers additional costs like software tools, meetings, and more. Take the total cost before overhead, multiply it by the overhead, and add it to that cost.
Here’s an example of that formula for an organization with five light integrations.
| 3 employees x 400 hours x 50$/hr + 25% overhead = $75,000 |
Now let’s look at the formula for determining the cost of outsourced integration resources.
| # of technical resources used x time per year spent managing integrations x external expert rate + contingency = Cost of outsourced integration resources |
Here’s what each variable in this formula means
- # of technical resources used: The number of external experts involved in building, managing, and troubleshooting outsourced integrations.
- Time spent per year managing integrations: The time spent is usually in line with internal integrations.
- Expert rate: External experts are often more expensive than internal developers. External development rates can range from $150-$250 an hour, depending on specialization and region.
- Contingency: A percentage of the rest of the cost that accounts for unexpected changes or delays.
Here’s an example of that formula for an organization that outsourced three complex integrations.
| 2 experts x 800 hours x $200/hr + 15% contingency = $736,000 |
This reflects a scenario with more complex integration needs. A simpler outsourced integration will lead to a lower cost.
Opportunity cost: The number you’re not counting
Opportunity cost can be more complex to calculate, but it can still have a massive impact. If you’re using an integration that allows business users to create and deploy integrations in minutes — instead of sending tickets to an ever-growing IT backlog — you’re not just saving in integration costs, you’re reclaiming essential time back. Imagine a team of project managers gets 160 hours a week back because they don’t have to copy and paste data back and forth between tools. Or a software development team recovers 500 hours a month because they don’t need to build integrations.
What can your teams do with that extra capacity? How can they contribute to your organization’s strategy? How much better can they collaborate in cross-functional projects?
You can put a number on opportunity cost by converting recovered time into a dollar figure, representing the real capacity your organization can dedicate to higher-value work. Let’s take that example of project managers saving 160 hours a week. Assuming an average fully-loaded hourly rate of $100 for 10 project managers, here’s the annual opportunity cost you’d be paying without an integration
| Annual opportunity cost: ($100 x 160) x 52 Annual opportunity cost: $832,000 |
Now imagine taking that number to a leadership team or a finance department and asking them what initiatives they could invest in with an extra $832,000 a year. You suddenly have a much more compelling case.
Examples of integration opportuntiy costs
Here are examples of companies using integration platforms, with the time and money saved from doing so.
Coveo, an AI-powered search and relevance company, has marketers working in Asana collaborating with software developers in Jira. When they deployed an integration solution to bridge the gap between these tools, they saved 1,000 hours a year in manual work and $218,000 a year.
HubSpot, one of the biggest CRM providers on the market, used a single platform to support integrations for Asana, Jira, Airtable, Google Calendar, and Google Sheets. That led to 7,900 hours and $595,000 saved annually.
The opportunity cost of not using the right integration platform can be nearly as expensive, if not more, than other costs.
Putting it together: The full ROI calculation
Now that you know all the costs involved, let’s put it all together into a single calculation that will give you a clear ROI for an integration platform. First, the formula for adding up all the savings you get from an integration.
| Total annual savings = Time cost + License savings + Technical resource cost |
Once you have that total savings figure, you can calculate the ROI of a specific integration platform with the following formula.
| Integration ROI = (Total annual savings – Total annual platform cost) ÷ Total annual platform cost |
Now let’s look at a real world example to put these formulas to work. One of the biggest video game developers in the world uses Unito to streamline development work across tools like Airtable, Asana, Trello, Jira, GitLab, and Google Sheets. Here’s the savings they see from these integrations.
- Time cost: $459,680 (5,408 hours a year x $85 an hour)
- License savings: $223,000
- Technical resource savings: $200,000
- Total annual savings: $882,680
For an integration platform like Unito, a company like this one can expect to pay about $50,000 a year.
Here’s what happens when you plug these numbers into the above formula:
| Integration ROI = ($882,680 – $50,000) ÷ $50,000 Integration ROI = $832,680 ÷ $50,000 Integration ROI = 16.7x |
Note that this is just one example, and the numbers are likely to change depending on the size of the teams involved, the systems used, and the workflows you’re integrating. Enterprise organizations often see double-digit integration ROI, while smaller organizations will see ROI multiples in the 4-8x range.
The business case template
Need to make a business case for an integration platform? Here’s a template for building this.
| Integration Business Case | |
| Number of people manually transferring data | |
| Average hours spent on transferring data (per week, per person) | |
| Fully-loaded hourly rate | |
| Time cost subtotal | |
| Number of dual-license seats | |
| Average seat cost per year | |
| License savings subtotal | |
| Number of technical resources on integration maintenance | |
| Hours of maintenance per year | |
| Fully-loaded hourly rate | |
| Overhead | |
| Technical resources cost subtotal | |
| Total annual savings | |
| Estimated platform cost | |
| ROI multiple | |
Want to calculate this automatically? Check out Unito’s Cost Savings Calculator.
Make the case
Integration platforms save you precious time and resources that you can dedicate to more important priorities. While initial deployment can be expensive and complex, consider it an investment. You’ll see some initial returns, but most of your ROI will come over time. You just need to know where the impact is to quantify it and make a business case for your integration of choice.
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FAQ: Integration ROI
What’s a realistic timeline to see ROI from an integration platform?
While this exact timeline will depend on the integration platform you use, some integration platforms will give you an initial return within days. That said, most of your ROI will come over months, anywhere from six months to 18.
How do I account for implementation and onboarding time in my ROI calculation?
Implementation and onboarding typically lead to a productivity dip as teams adapt to new tools and workflows. Finance teams and leaders often push back on this point, so it should be included in your business case.
Don’t include implementation and onboarding time in your main ROI calculation. Rather, include them in a different calculation: your payback period. This shows how long it takes for an integration solution to cover the costs involved in implementation, onboarding, and other expenses with cost savings over time.
The formula for this is:
Payback period = Total investment ÷ Net monthly savings
Be aware that finance teams may discount opportunity costs. Instead, frame it as capacity recovered rather than cost eliminated to make it more defensible.
Should I include opportunity cost in my integration business case?
Absolutely. The time your teams spend working around multiple tools without a software integration is time they can’t spend on innovating, solving problems, or collaborating on important projects. Quantifying this cost can be challenging, but tracking the hours spent on manual data transfers and multiplying them by the average fully-loaded hourly rate of the people involved will give you a good baseline.
How do I estimate hours spent on manual sync if my team doesn’t track it?
To roughly estimate the number of hours teams spend manually transferring data for specific projects, determine if they require light, moderate, or heavy manual work:
- Light manual work involves small teams and one or two tools. Estimate two to five hours of work per person, per week.
- Moderate manual work involves cross-functional projects with three to five tools. Estimate five to 10 hours of work per person, per week.
- Heavy manual work involves six tools or more, with regular reporting requirements. Estimate 10 to 15 hours per person, per work.
What if our integration needs are too custom for a standard platform?
Many integration platforms, like Unito, offer some level of custom integration development for enterprise organizations. This can allow you to get the benefits of a standard platform (e.g., ease of use, no maintenance) and those of custom development (e.g., uniquely suited to your needs). The key is to analyze whether your custom needs are linked to integration logic or support tools. Most standard platforms handle tool variety well, but specific data transformation needs may require additional development.
How does integration ROI differ for small teams vs. enterprise?
For small teams, the upfront cost of an integration platform is more significant (proportionally to revenue), while the returns of deploying that platform are represented across fewer collaborators. While enterprise organizations can pay significantly more for an integration platform, they will see outsized results over time, across multiple teams, departments, and projects.