Published by Tenth Gear Consulting

By now you probably heard of DeepSeek that trained an AI model at significantly lower cost that OpenAI (and on a less powerful hardware) that hit similar benchmarks.

Their secret?

They did more with less, becoming another scrappy company that beat a well funded and better known competitor.

This was a real-life reminder that innovation often sparked by limited resources, questioning existing status quo can lead to better decisions and being smaller and more agile is an advantage.

Getting a handle on tech cost increases

Efficiency in IT budgets is the goal for 2025. Per Gartner’s published report, the spending is estimated to grow 14% on software, 23% on data centers and 9% I IT services (with almost 10% average spend increase across all categories due to somewhat reasonable 4% communication services bump).

What’s worse, the growth in IT products and services may not directly translate to ROI - just because AI will be bundled everywhere doesn’t mean your business can magically benefit from it in a reasonably measurable way.

So how do you become scrappy?

Challenge old advice

“You must run your software on Windows OS”

If your situation allows switching to Linux/Unix and other open source alternatives would significantly reduce the cost- from servers (almost 50% less) to databases to desktop computers the savings will add up.

“You must purchase SSL certificate from DigiCert”.

Depending on your business and industry regulations, a domain level validation certificate from LetsEncrypt (cost - 0) could be sufficient.

“Your servers should be hosted on AWS or Azure.”

Your needs may be covered by purchasing VPS from Digital Ocean - at almost half the cost, better CPU price performance and transparent easy to understand costs. Just like with insurance, it pays to shop around.

What other assumptions do you follow?

Cut through marketing hype - ask tough questions

Tech is not magic - but you may think it is by listening to some sales pitches! Be skeptical and informed on how something works on a high level so you can ask tough questions.