Renew &
Expand

FY26 Business Case · Prepared for Finance Review
Why Anthem Studios should renew Open Design and grow from 40 to 85 seats.
40 → 85 seats
24-mo renewal
anthem studios
Prepared by
Open Design account team · for Anthem Studios
Prepared for
Dana Reyes, Design Ops · Priya Shah, VP Finance
01 / 08

Every week without full-team access costs Anthem three days of duplicate design work.

The business case, in one line
Prepared for Priya Shah, VP Finance
02 / 08
The case, in six parts.
Anthem Studios · renewal & expansion
01.

Buyer pain

Forty seats can't cover Product and Marketing, so requests queue behind Brand and spill onto contractors.

02.

Current cost

$142K a year in overflow freelance spend, plus a nine-day average concept-to-approved-asset cycle.

03.

Proposed change

Renew for 24 months and expand from 40 to 85 seats, bringing Product and Marketing onto the same platform.

04.

Proof

94% weekly seat utilization and a 3.2x rise in shipped projects since go-live, on the existing 40 seats.

05.

Rollout

Phased onboarding across three sprints, led by Design Ops, with BYOK keys provisioned per team.

06.

Commercial ask

Approve the 45-seat expansion and lock the renewal price ahead of the Q3 team kickoff.

03 / 08
Chapter one — the cost of the status quo

Design work is bottlenecked on seats, not on talent.

Anthem's 40 Open Design seats sit inside Brand. Product and Marketing route requests through Brand's queue or pay outside agencies to skip it — $142K last year, on work Anthem's own team could have shipped in-house with the right access.

04 / 08
The proof, by quarter.
Shipped projects on the existing 40 seats
94%
Weekly seat utilization
Nearly every licensed seat is active every week — the constraint is headcount of seats, not adoption.
3.2x
Shipped projects, YoY
Brand's output has more than tripled since go-live, with headcount unchanged.
Q1 24
Q2 24
Q3 24
Q4 24
Q1 25
Q2 25
Q4 25
Q1 26
05 / 08
A note from the champion

"Turnaround went from nine days to three. Renewing was never in question — the only question was how fast we could add more seats."

Dana Reyes
Head of Design Ops, Anthem Studios
06 / 08
The business case, line by line.
Prepared for the FY26 renewal review
No.
Line item
Detail
Status
Change
01.
Current seats
40 seats licensed to the Brand team since FY24.
Active
40
02.
Seat utilization
Weekly active seats, above the 80% healthy-adoption target.
Healthy
+18pts
03.
Turnaround time
Concept-to-approved-asset cycle, Brand team average.
Improved
−67%
04.
Contractor spend
Freelance overflow work absorbed back in-house.
Reduced
−$142K
05.
Proposed expansion
New seats for Product and Marketing teams.
Requested
+45
06.
Renewal term
24-month term with price locked through FY28.
Proposed
24mo
07.
Projected ROI
Modeled against current contractor offset and cycle-time gains.
Modeled
6.4x
08.
Decision needed
Sign-off to renew and expand ahead of Q3 team kickoff.
Pending
Q3
07 / 08
Renewal & Expansion · FY26

Approve by
quarter's end.

08 / 08