A mid-market e-commerce business typically runs 5-8 separate software tools: an inventory management system, accounting software, a shipping provider, a PIM or spreadsheet for product data, a separate B2B ordering system, and various spreadsheets to glue it all together. The subscription costs alone add up to £500-£2,000 per month.
But the real cost isn't subscriptions — it's integration maintenance, data reconciliation, and the human time spent switching between systems. Our research shows that operations teams spend 10-15 hours per week on manual data entry between systems, error correction from sync failures, and reconciliation between tools that should agree but don't.
At £15/hour fully loaded, that's £600-£900 per month in invisible labour costs. Add subscription fees and you're looking at £1,100-£2,900 per month for a patchwork that still has data quality problems. Helium replaces the entire stack for a fraction of the cost — and eliminates the integration overhead entirely.