RIAs Are Paying for Hidden API and AI Agent Vendor Fees
Orion’s going to charge technology providers for API access, Salesforce is going to meter AI agent calls at a rate it hasn’t published, and everyone is asking who pays. I think we’re asking the wrong question. Someone always pays, and in this industry, it’s nearly always the RIA.
Here’s how it goes. Vendor A starts getting an invoice for connecting to a platform from Vendor B that its clients already pay for. There are only a few options; they can pass it on, and the RIA wears a new surcharge for getting the same service, they can discontinue the integration, but the RIA loses the efficiency unlock, or they can absorb the cost, which sounds appealing but is quietly the worst of all, because that money comes out of their innovation roadmap.
Every path ends at a firm trying to get at its own data and seeing diminishing value. The seemingly easy answer is to shift vendors. But anyone who has run a conversion knows that comes at a steep cost across licensing fees, project costs, and lost productivity.
Openness has a track record. Nils Bohlin designed the three-point safety belt at Volvo in 1959, and Volvo gave the patent to every competitor it had, on the view it was worth more in every car than in theirs alone. More than a million lives, by Volvo’s own count. Merck has given Mectizan away since 1987, as much as needed for as long as needed, and river blindness was eradicated from four countries. Closer to home, Anthropic published MCP in November 2024, free and open, then handed it to the Linux Foundation so nobody could own it. OpenAI and Google adopted it.
None of these companies were diminished by the giving. Volvo still sells safety. Merck is still Merck. MCP became the way this industry connects because it was free to pick up.
Countless industry surveys highlight the lack of quality integration as the thing holding advisors back. Rightly, we’ve seen this improve over the past decade, but these recent announcements are pulling in the other direction.
None of these means software should be free. APIs cost real money to build and more to secure, and an unprofitable vendor can’t build anything worth connecting to. Instead, charge transparently for the value you deliver and let clients decide if that value justifies the fee. Hiding costs in integrations and opaque consumption charges shouldn’t be the standard we accept. I know it’s possible because Practifi doesn’t charge integration fees or consumption costs on anything we sell, and we don’t intend to start.
Bohlin’s patent is in every car on the road. That’s what open looks like when it works.
