“In the first couple of weeks we were able to show that the Glimpse events that we'd built were running us around $1,000 a day in total — like end-to-end cost — and I think Adobe was costing us about $33,000 a day. And so we were able to quickly say let's rip this out because the data is reliable, it's working, we're confident.”

Disney+ Internal Tracking at $1K/Day Beat Adobe at $33K/Day — Within Weeks of Launch

Disney+ built Glimpse — a custom internal clickstream event architecture — with Adobe as a backup. Within days of launch, at 10M users on day one, the cost gap was 33x: $33K/day for Adobe vs $1K/day for Glimpse. The internal system won on cost, data ownership, and GDPR compliance. For most small apps the economics don't justify building; the lesson is to have cost evaluation checkpoints pre-agreed before you scale into vendor lock-in you can't afford to exit.