Cost effective cross platform testing tool

When we first signed up for the product, our initial plan was to use it for cross browser testing. Today we use BrowserStack for Live testing, App testing and performance testing. Our application needs to be supported by different browsers and OS, and having a BrowserStack Live subscription has reduced our cost by not having purchase the real devices for each team member. Also for our App, we were able to utilize the BrowserStack App automated testing and check the builds. We were in the market for UI performance tool, compared between tools like lighthouse vs webpagetests, but finally decided on BrowserStack "Speed Lab" as it has all the metrics that we were looking for.

Some team members work remotely from different locations and had to purchase new / ship existing physical devices for testing. Sharing devices across the team members needed continuous coordination. If there was a communication gap, other dependent teams had to wait for the device.