The $1.2M Hidden Opportunity: Why AEC Owners Need a TCO Analysis in 2025

Most AEC firm owners know what they spend on workstations, Autodesk licenses, and server upkeep.But almost every firm misses the

Advance2000

TCO

Most AEC firm owners know what they spend on workstations, Autodesk licenses, and server upkeep.
But almost every firm misses the biggest cost in their business:

Architect and engineer downtime.

A 1.2 GB Revit model taking 42 seconds to open may not seem like much—until you multiply it across your entire team.

For a 120-person firm, those tiny delays quietly add up to:

$612,000 a year in lost productivity.

This one line item is bigger than most firms’ entire hardware budget, yet it never shows up on any spreadsheet.

A full Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis uncovers these hidden losses. Most firms discover $500,000 to $2.1M in annual savings—money that can be redirected into hiring, profitability, or growth.

The Traditional Workstation Model Is a Financial Trap

A typical 120-person AEC firm spends heavily on hardware:

Workstations, monitors, UPS systems, labor: $1.27M every three years
Electricity: $90K/year
Internal IT labor: $285K/year
Software over-licensing: $78K/year

Total visible costs: ~$1.5M annually

But the real financial bleed is slow performance:

Long model open times
Slow regenerations
Delayed renders
Teams waiting on machines instead of designing

At $150/hour, those lost seconds equal $1.84M over three years—more than the hardware itself.

Owners feel the cost even if they don’t see it on paper.

How Advance2000 Flips the Equation

Advance2000’s high-performance private cloud replaces expensive workstations with GPU-powered virtual desktops that are:

Faster
More consistent
Easier to scale
Cheaper to operate

For the same 120 seats:

Cost: $736K annually (a 51% reduction)

Performance improvements:

Model open times drop from 42 seconds to 4 seconds
Enscape/VR renders finish in minutes, not hours
Generative design iterations accelerate from 48 hours to 90 minutes
No workstation depreciation or $90K utility bills
IT staffing needs shrink by up to 70%
Compliance and audits are handled automatically

You gain speed, predictability, and major cost savings—all at once.

Real Firms, Real Results

AEC leaders who run the numbers see dramatic gains:

Walter P Moore saved $1.8M in the first year and won multiple $800M projects due to faster engineering cycles.
Page Southerland Page eliminated all hardware CapEx and cut model load times by 90%.
Gensler removed 3,200 workstations and now loads 1.8 GB Revit models in 4 seconds at 198 FPS.

These are not exceptions—they’re the new reality for firms that modernize.