Spesia: Cutting 35% of integration costs by dropping the platform that charged per connector

Finland’s second-largest special vocational institution has 14 locations, around 1,500 students and more than 700 staff. Getting data to move reliably between systems — student administration system, Active Directory, databases, reporting tools — is central to how Spesia operates. For years, that meant Boomi. And for years, every time the IT team needed to add a new integration, the same question came up: is this worth another connector fee?

More often than not, the answer was no.

When in early 2026 Spesia migrated to Frends, annual platform costs dropped 35%.

More importantly, the team can now build the integrations that their previous platform’s pricing model had made impractical.

When every new connector costs thousands

Boomi worked. That’s worth saying plainly, because the decision to leave wasn’t driven by outages or reliability failures. Jarno Vallo, one of Spesia’s two Boomi administrators, is straightforward about it: “It was quite a solid system — it didn’t really go down or require extra monitoring.”

The problem was the pricing model. Every new connector added hundreds of euros per month to the bill. For a public sector organization working within fixed IT budgets, that meant a recurring calculation each time a new integration was needed. Niko Koivisto, Head of IT at Spesia, describes how it played out in practice.

"Every time you needed a new Boomi connector, you were looking at another increase of thousands of euros annually. Then it became a threshold question: is it worth building this integration, or do I just continue without modernizing to save money?"

The integrations that didn’t clear that bar simply didn’t get built. A lightweight process running once a day, connecting a single small system, occasionally needed for six months. Under Boomi’s model, those were rarely worth the connector cost.

Mikko Lackman, Spesia’s integration builder, saw this regularly.

“Pricing flexibility is probably one of the most important features for an organization like ours,” he says.

There was a second problem running in parallel. The Boomi environment had been built incrementally, based on the knowledge available at the time. The result was a landscape of duplicate integrations: built copy-paste, maintained separately, growing heavier to manage with every addition. “There was quite a lot of duplication,” Mikko says. “Copy-paste was the approach in many cases, which wasn’t ideal from a maintenance standpoint.”

Choosing a platform that doesn’t penalize building

When Spesia started evaluating alternatives, several platforms made it to the demo stage. Workato came close to the final, but its row-based pricing model created a similar problem. Spesia processes a high volume of rows, and the cost at scale ruled it out.

Frends stood out for two reasons. The first was the predictable pricing model: no per-connector fees, no penalty for building small or occasional integrations. The second was peer validation. During an event from a renowned vocational education network, other Finnish institutions shared hands-on demos of how they use the Frends platform.

Being a European vendor with Finnish roots was an additional and positive factor in a procurement context where local accountability matters.

A migration completed before summer

The implementation project started at the turn of January and February 2026 with a clear target: migrate all Boomi integrations to Frends before the summer holiday period. The project was delivered on schedule.

"It's reassuring to know that the integrations have been migrated and everything is working. The old provider has now been terminated, so no more two services running in parallel," says Niko.

The Frends onboarding structure — training first, then hands-on building — gave the team enough grounding to work through the migration with confidence.

"The onboarding was very smooth. The knowledge gained was substantial. Long days sitting through it, but I think it went well," says Jarno. Mikko adds: "There was no feeling of needing to spend time Googling things during the training. It went pretty well."

When onboarding hours ran ahead of schedule, the remaining time went toward exploring Frends’ API capabilities for future use, a sign that the core work had been completed efficiently enough to leave room for looking ahead.

One change, reflected in 26 places at once

The most significant architectural shift wasn’t just moving integrations from one platform to another. It was rebuilding them in a way that solved the copy-paste maintenance problem that had built up in Boomi over the years.

With the support of Frends, the team built a sub-process model that centralized shared logic. Mikko now runs approximately 26 to 27 near-identical processes through a single shared sub-process. A change made once is reflected everywhere.

"That is the biggest advantage, a change made in one place is reflected everywhere," says Mikko. "It significantly speeds up building and maintaining new processes."

For Spesia’s core use case (pushing data from Active Directory and other source systems into databases and reporting tools), this makes all the difference. Future integrations following the same pattern can be built faster and managed centrally. Monitoring, which had been inconsistent in the past, is now built into every process from day one, with automatic error notifications configured as standard.

"We got the templates built pretty well directly. Small improvements made along the way, but they are now done logically and centrally in a consistent way," says Mikko.

Immediate cost savings and a different kind of freedom

The direct financial outcome is straightforward. Switching platforms meant saving almost half of their integration budget on a like-for-like basis.

But the saving that’s harder to put a number on is equally real. With no connector fees, the threshold question — is this integration worth building? — no longer factors cost into the answer. A small integration that runs occasionally and solves a specific need is now worth building, simply because it’s useful. That’s a different relationship with integration than the one Spesia had before.

With the new platform fully onboarded and no dual costs running in parallel, the integration environment is cleaner, cheaper and more maintainable than at any point before the migration.

What the team would tell others starting the same journey

One lesson is clear: start earlier than you think you need to. Spesia’s procurement discussions began in summer 2024, but the implementation didn’t start until early 2026. The migration completed on time, but the compressed timeline added pressure that an earlier start would have avoided.

Jarno’s advice for organizations evaluating platforms is practical: consider carefully which team members to involve in the implementation. Even though Frends uses BPMN 2.0 notation, he sees value in having people with coding skills in the project. “You can get very far in Frends with just point-and-click.”

Building on a solid foundation

For now, the focus is on consolidation. The migration is done, the foundation is stable, and the team is running a leaner integration environment than what they had before. What comes next is going deeper: more automation, more use of the API capabilities the team explored during onboarding, and more of the integrations that their previous solution made impractical to build.

The sub-process model gives them the architecture to scale without the maintenance overhead. Each new integration following the established pattern can be built faster and kept consistent from the start.

The platform that once made every new integration a cost decision now makes building the straightforward choice.