Nobody notices a SaaS bill when it's £2,500 a month and everyone's using the thing. That's the point of subscriptions: each payment is small enough to approve and too boring to interrogate. The problem isn't any single month. It's what five years of them add up to, with the price rises bolted on.
So let's actually add it up, with a completely ordinary example.
The setup
A 25-person business runs its operations on a mid-market SaaS product at £100 per seat per month. That's £2,500 a month, £30,000 a year. Not a shocking number. Not one that would ever trigger a board conversation.
Now the rises. SaaS vendors in the UK and US have settled at 10 to 20 per cent a year, often announced quietly in a billing email. Some years it's a headline price change, some years it's a "plan restructuring" that lands the same way. Call it 12 per cent on average, compounding.
Five years of renting
| Year | Annual cost | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | £30,000 | £30,000 |
| 2 | £33,600 | £63,600 |
| 3 | £37,632 | £101,232 |
| 4 | £42,148 | £143,380 |
| 5 | £47,206 | £190,585 |
£190,585 over five years. At the end of it you own nothing. No code, no database, no infrastructure. In year six the meter is still running, at higher rates, and cancelling means walking away from every workflow and all the history your team has built inside someone else's rented warehouse.
That last part is the fence. Vendors know the switching cost is the real product. It's why they can keep raising the price without losing you.
The same five years, owning
Here's the identical situation rebuilt as owned software, priced the way Deedware prices it: you pay what you already pay, for 24 months, then the licence stops.
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Months 1 to 24, at your current bill | £60,000 |
| Months 25 to 60, licence | £0 |
| Optional maintenance from month 25 (say £500/month) | £18,000 |
| Total over five years | £78,000 |
£78,000 all-in with a maintenance retainer, or £60,000 if you'd rather self-host and look after it yourself. Against £190,585, that's £112,585 kept over five years. And in year six the gap widens, because your subscription line is zero while their price rise schedule carries on without you.
What you actually own
This is the part people undersell. When the 24 months finish, you hold the source code, the database, the infrastructure config and the documentation. The software keeps running whether we're involved or not. If you want to change it, you can hire anyone you like. If you want to sell the company, the software is an asset on the deal, not a monthly liability a buyer has to price in.
Renting isn't stupid. It's how software got funded for twenty years and it made sense for most of that. It just stops making sense at a particular size, and the only reliable way to spot that moment is to run the five-year sum on your own bill rather than a monthly one.
Run your own numbers
Take your actual subscription: seats times price per seat, per month. Apply 12 per cent a year for five years. Compare it to 24 months at your current rate and nothing after. That's the whole argument, in your own figures.
We built a calculator that does exactly this, using your own SaaS name, seat count and price. It takes about thirty seconds and the number it shows you is the number you'd pay.
Work out what your subscription really costs
Enter what you pay now. See both five-year sums side by side.
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