One of the big benefits of Segment's higher tiers is that you can replay historical data into new tools, which I don't believe is typically possible if you just integrate a new platform directly. Business needs change.

In our case we route analytics to Google Analytics, Intercom, and a Postgres database (using Segment's warehousing support) - that gives us high level analytics for marketing, customer support tooling, and raw data for the team who work with that.

We provide a white labelled platform for a few enterprise customers as well, and Segment allows us to route data to the appropriate accounts for each of those services, rather than having to set everything up manually each time.