Nobody chose to run their company on nine systems. It accumulated.
Every one of them was a sensible decision at the time. The result is nobody's plan, and it is quietly expensive.
How it happens.
You start with an accounting package because you have to. You add a CRM when the spreadsheet of leads becomes embarrassing. A webshop, because customers expect one. A ticketing tool, once support gets too big for a shared mailbox. An HR system when someone finally counts the holiday requests in an inbox. A file drive. A chat app. A tool for proposals.
Each decision took an afternoon and solved a real problem. Nobody sat down and designed this. And now the customer exists in five places, the stock figure exists in three, and there is a person whose actual job is keeping them agreeing.
The software industry has an answer for this, and the answer is to sell you a ninth product that connects the other eight.
The same company on Trivena
- One instance holding all 18 applications
- One customer record, visible from everywhere
- One login and one permission model
- One monthly invoice, published price, no seats
- Nothing to integrate, because nothing is separate
- A ceiling of 99 euro a month at the largest published plan
What the patchwork actually costs.
Only the first of these appears on a budget line. The other four are where the money goes.
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The subscriptions
Seven or eight products, each priced per user per month, each with a tier that hides the feature you actually need one level above where you are. This is the number most companies can quote.
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The glue
An integration platform, or a developer, or both, keeping the systems agreeing with each other. This cost is real, recurring, and almost never counted as software spend.
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The re-keying
Somebody typing an order from the shop into the accounting package. Somebody exporting hours into payroll. Half a role, spread across four people, doing work that exists only because the systems are separate.
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The reconciliation
The monthly ritual of working out why two systems disagree, and the meetings about which number to present. Expensive, invisible, and demoralising.
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The decisions made late
The largest cost and the hardest to put a figure on. You find out about the margin problem in week six because the data needed to see it in week one lived in three places.
Three ways to run a company's software.
Stated as fairly as we can manage, including where we are the wrong answer.
| A stack of specialist tools | A large enterprise suite | Trivena | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where the data lives | Split across every vendor | One system, often several modules | One database |
| Integration work | Continuous, and yours | Large upfront project | None internally |
| How you are billed | Per user, per product, per tier | Per user, plus licences and modules | On resource use, never per user |
| Time to running | Fast per tool, slow overall | Six to eighteen months | Days to weeks |
| AI | An assistant per product, no shared context | Bolted on, usually a paid tier | An agent per department, on live data |
| When something breaks | Work out which vendor owns it | Vendor, plus implementation partner | One company, who wrote all of it |
| Best when | One department has an unusual, deep need | You are very large and heavily regulated | You want the whole company in one system |
The objections worth taking seriously.
These are the four we hear most. Two of them are good arguments.
Best of breed beats one suite
It did, when suites were genuinely worse at each individual job. That argument was won in an era where the alternative to a specialist CRM was a bad CRM bolted to an accounting package. What it never accounted for is the cost of the seams. If your specialist tools are ninety percent as good individually but cannot see each other's data, the combination is worse at the thing you actually care about, which is running the company.
Nobody gets fired for buying the big vendor
True, and also the reason a lot of mid-sized companies are running an implementation that cost more than their annual profit. The large enterprise suites are genuinely capable and genuinely priced for organisations with a procurement department and a systems integrator on retainer. A hundred person company does not need eighteen months and a partner ecosystem to invoice its customers.
You are a young company
We are. What we are not is a company that assembled a suite by acquiring six products and putting one logo on them. Every application here was built against the same data model from the start, by the same people, which is precisely why they behave as one system. That is not something a larger vendor can retrofit.
What if you disappear
A fair question and one you should ask every vendor. Your data is yours and fully exportable at any time in open formats, including the database itself. There is no proprietary export step, no data hostage situation, and no fee to leave. We would rather earn the renewal.
The first company in the Netherlands to put all of it in one place.
Plenty of vendors sell part of this. Some sell an ERP with a CRM attached. Some sell a suite of office tools. Some sell an AI layer that reads whatever you point it at. Nobody in this market ships the operational system, the customer facing system, the daily tools and a department level agent as one product, on one database, at a published price a small company can actually pay.
We built it because we understood the businesses first and the software second, which is the opposite of how most of this industry works. The size of the company does not change the shape of the problem, so it does not change what we ship.
- Every application a company needs, from one vendor, under one licence
- An AI agent inside each department rather than one assistant on top
- Usage based pricing on a full suite, with unlimited staff accounts
- European hosting and data residency as the default, not an enterprise upgrade
- One company that writes, hosts, supports and fixes the whole stack
