This report, based on a single Temporal Cloud client, reflects insights developed in consultation with Temporal Solution Architects. The estimates provided represent a typical use case for a large customer with complex operational needs, high-quality service expectations, and numerous opportunities to adopt Temporal internally.
The following ROI analysis compares the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the Client's existing homegrown Inventory Management System (IES) with Temporal Cloud.
By implementing Temporal as a replacement for their current IES, the Client stands to gain significant advantages, including reduced infrastructure and human resource costs, improved system stability, and enhanced long-term scalability.
Key Findings
This detailed analysis of the Client’s current state data shows that by implementing Temporal, the Client will save $2.25 million annually across three critical areas:
- $477,000 in infrastructure costs
- $1.2 million ($100,000/month) in maintenance and incident management costs
- $576,000 in human capital costs
In addition to cost savings, the use of Temporal Cloud offers several other benefits that improve the client’s operations. Temporal Cloud enables faster feature development, keeping your organization innovative and ahead of market changes. It improves system stability and enhanced data accuracy, leading to greater customer satisfaction by fostering greater trust and loyalty. And finally, Temporal’s architecture ensures that the client’s IES grows with the business, reducing the risk of future technical debt and operational failures.
The following research delves deeper into these advantages and their implications for the client’s long-term success.
Evaluating Infrastructure Costs
The Client’s current infrastructure costs associated with their IES show significant financial implications. The existing setup, using EventDB and Confluent Cloud, costs them $46,600, totaling an annual cost of $559,200, excluding AWS support fees.
In contrast, if the Client used Temporal Cloud, their estimated monthly actions would cost $6,549 with a storage cost of $327, making their total monthly expenditure $6,876 and their annual expenditure $82,517.
Switching to Temporal Cloud reduces the Client’s annual infrastructure costs from $559,200 to $82,517, a potential savings of $476,683 annually.
Source: Temporal at Stripe: Mastering Kafka at Scale..
Maintenance and Incident Management Costs
Presently, the Client's existing IES is prone to a significant number of incidents, with an average of six active issues — four classified as low severity and two as medium severity — occurring at any given time.
These incidents not only contribute to operational instability, but they also have a substantial financial impact, with a revenue loss estimated at $100,000 monthly, or approximately $10,000 per incident.
The time required for incident resolution varies: low severity incidents typically take one to two weeks, medium severity can take two to five weeks, and high severity issues may extend beyond a month.
Beyond this, the frequent instability of the system requires ongoing troubleshooting, patching, and remediation, creating a continuous drain on resources.
Currently, capturing and quantifying incident data poses challenges due to the complexity of the disparate systems in use. It’s a time-intensive process that requires custom queries. Moreover, troubleshooting involves piecing together logs from multiple services and manually re-executing events to reproduce failures. This prolonged approach not only heightens the risk of escalation into more severe disruptions but also incurs additional costs for senior technical staff or external consultants.
The Impact of Temporal Cloud
Transitioning to Temporal Cloud offers significant improvement in terms of cost and time. The Client can expect a 40% reduction in incident-related tasks for the Engineering and Innovation (EII) team, effectively repurposing approximately 384 hours of engineering time per month — equivalent to three full-time employees — toward proactive feature development and innovation.
Beyond this, there is a 60% reduction of the Sustain team’s workload, allowing the Client to eliminate most reactive support tasks. This shift leads to fewer support tickets, less troubleshooting, and substantial cost reductions.
Time Savings
Additionally, the enhanced workflow visibility, automatic retries, and deterministic execution reduces the time needed to identify and resolve issues by 50-75%. This improvement stems from the elimination of manual error reproduction and the ability to pinpoint failure points through Temporal’s workflow history.
How Temporal Helps
Temporal’s strengths shine through in the following features:
- Automatic Retries and State Management: Temporal maintains the full state of workflows and automatically retries failed steps. This eliminates the need to manually check logs or database states to identify where things went wrong.
- Clear Workflow History: Temporal provides complete visibility into the history of each workflow, making it easier to trace errors and understand the sequence of events that led to the problem.
- Deterministic Execution: Temporal ensures that workflows are deterministic, enabling the replay and re-execution of errors from the point of failure. This feature alone can cut down the time spent replicating bugs for investigation.
- Simplified Error Handling: Temporal supports centralized error handling strategies, which reduce the complexity of dealing with edge cases and failures spread across multiple services or components.
Many of our other customer’s experiences support these claims, with companies like Bugcrowd reporting a 50% reduction in downtime and Turo highlighting significant improvements in development velocity and maintainability after adopting Temporal.
Transitioning to Temporal Cloud eases the burden of ongoing maintenance associated and paves the way for operational efficiency and innovation.
Human Capital Costs
The current staffing model for the Client includes two teams that maintain and troubleshoot the IES. Team 1 (EII) is a group of six full-time employees: one Engineering Manager, three Senior Managers, one mid-level Engineer, and two Junior Engineers. This team handles business flow fixes and feature development. However, because of the instability of the current system, they spend 60-70% of their time on reactionary tasks such as incident resolution and system patching. Over the past three years, this has impeded their production flow, resulting in only three new features being developed.
Team 2 (Sustain) is a group of six contracted employees: one Senior Engineer and five mid-level Engineers. They’re dedicated to triaging incidents and providing 24/7, on-call support.
By using Temporal Cloud, the Client would reduce their time spent on labor-intensive, reactionary work for both teams. For Team 1, Temporal would decrease the time spent on reactive tasks by 40%, freeing up resources for strategic initiatives and enabling the development of more features at a faster pace.
For Team 2, Temporal’s enhanced system stability and streamlined troubleshooting capabilities would reduce the need for 24/7 support by 60%, significantly lowering labor costs.
A move to Temporal allows both teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than an endless stream of problem solving.
Data Reliability and Productivity Gains
The Client’s current system experiences frequent data inaccuracies and reliability issues, leading to ongoing maintenance and patching. During peak periods, inventory events spike up to 10x, putting further strain on the infrastructure. The instability of the Client's IES directly hampers productivity, as the Client has only delivered three new features over the past three years. This is largely due to the heavy focus on incident management. Because of this, each feature takes 2-3 months to implement. Improved Feature Velocity with Temporal Temporal’s improved reliability would not only enhance data accuracy but also allow for faster, more agile development cycles. This would result in:
- Faster Feature Delivery: Enabling the business to better respond to market demands.
- Increased Revenue: Through higher system uptime and fewer lost sales because of outages.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: Thanks to more reliable inventory data and fewer disruptions.
Long-Term Sustainability and Future Proofing
Currently, the Client faces an accumulation of technical debt because of the ongoing patching and reactive nature of the current IES.This only makes future maintenance even more costly and time-consuming. Temporal provides a solution by eliminating much of the need for reactive measures, lowering the long-term costs of system maintenance.
In addition to this, Temporal's scalable architecture allows the Client to grow its operations without compromising reliability, even during high-demand periods like the holidays. Processing millions of transactions robustly can be a complex problem. Traditional order services often utilize state machines, databases and distributed sagas to keep track of all the various steps that an order must go through in its lifetime. Each of the steps in a saga can fail or become unavailable. Ensuring that the system can handle spikes in activity without the risk of failure is crucial to any organization invested in long-term growth and a successful future.
Conclusion: Direct Cost Savings and Strategic Value
Migrating to Temporal Cloud offers the Client substantial direct cost savings and long-term strategic benefits. The estimated annual savings total $2.25 million, broken down as follows:
- $477,000 in infrastructure cost reductions
- $1.2 million saved by reducing revenue loss from system downtime and data inaccuracies
- $576,000 in labor savings annually by repurposing 40% of the EII team’s resources and reducing 60% of the on-call support for the Sustain team.
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