Add up what you pay to rent your software.
This page is for owners and operators who suspect the subscriptions have quietly become one of the larger line items in the business. Put your monthly bills in, and the tool shows the ten-year total with renewal increases applied, next to what the same thing costs to build once and own.
Nothing is stored unless you ask us to email you the breakdown.
What you rent today
List every subscription that runs the business. Seats, add-ons, integrations, the payment processor's monthly fee.
Set it to zero if you want the most conservative version of this. The case holds either way.
Builds start at $10,000 and scale with scope. Put a real quote in here if you have one. Hosting and upkeep sit on top and vary with the build, so they are not assumed here.
What it adds up to
Rent this stack for 10 years and you spend
$150,935
and own nothing at the end of it.
- Renting, per month today
- $1,000
- Renting, per month in year 10
- $1,551
- Renting, this year
- $12,000
- Owning, all in over 10 years
- $30,000
Break-even
Year 2.4
That is the month the rent you have already paid passes the cost of having owned it. Every month after that is money you keep. By year 10 you are $120,935 ahead, and you still have the asset.
Thirty minutes on your actual stack. You get a written summary afterward, including the tools we think you should keep renting.
Break-even lands at year 2.5.
Here is the version with no assumptions doing any work. A business paying $1,000 a month in software, and a $30,000 build to replace it.
- Rented, 10 years, flat
- $120,000
- Rented, 10 years, 5% a year
- $151,000
- Owned, 10 years
- $30,000
- Break-even
- Year 2.5
$12,000 a year, no price increases at all.
The same stack with typical renewal creep.
A one-time build. Hosting and upkeep vary, so they are not assumed.
Flat pricing. Sooner once increases are assumed.
Year 2.5 is the moment the money you have already handed a vendor passes what the thing would have cost to own. Everything after that is the difference between an expense and an asset.
By year ten you are $90,000 to $121,000 ahead, depending on whether your renewals stayed flat or crept up the way renewals do. And you still have the software, the source code, and the data.
// Why the flip happened
Renting software was the economical choice for a long time, because custom used to cost roughly ten times what it costs now. That is no longer true. In 2026 a general-purpose tool that fits nobody exactly is both worse and, over any real time horizon, more expensive than one built to fit.
Renting is not wrong. Renting forever is.
SaaS is the right call early. You are still working out how the business runs, and a monthly fee beats a build every time when the requirements are still moving. The math turns when your process settles and the subscription becomes a permanent line item that only ever goes one direction.
You do not rent your trucks forever. You do not rent your shop floor forever. Software is the one asset most businesses have agreed to rent for the life of the company, and the only reason that made sense was cost. That reason expired.
The number the tool gives you is not an instruction to cancel everything on Monday. It is a gut check on which of your systems have earned the right to be owned.
Want the long version? Read the full cost breakdown, or see how a build is priced and financed.
What this calculator does not count.
A number you cannot poke holes in is a number nobody believes. Here is what sits outside the model, in both directions.
Not counted, favours renting
A vendor absorbs some real costs
- Their roadmap. New features arrive without you paying for them specifically.
- Compliance work they do once and spread across every customer.
- A support desk that exists whether or not you use it.
Not counted, favours owning
Rented tools cost you outside the invoice
- Hours lost to workarounds because the tool does it the vendor's way, not yours.
- Per-seat pricing that charges you more every time you hire.
- Data you cannot get out cleanly, which is what makes leaving expensive.
- Repricing, forced tier changes, and features moved behind a higher plan.
Generic software is fine until your process is figured out. The day it is, the subscription stops being a tool and starts being rent.
The objections people raise.
Still not answered? Send the question and you get a straight reply, not a sales sequence.
Why compare over ten years and not three?
Because three years is shorter than the software lasts. A tool that runs your dispatch or your invoicing is still running it a decade later, and the subscription is still being paid a decade later. Ten years is how long the decision is actually live, so it is the honest window to compare in. Set the price increase to zero if you want the most conservative version.
Does the owned side really cost nothing to run?
No. There is hosting, backups, monitoring and the odd change, and for most builds it is small enough to disappear into an ordinary month. It varies too much with the build to put a figure on it here, so the calculator leaves it out rather than invent one, and the owned column is the build cost alone. What disappears entirely is the per-seat fee, the annual renewal increase, and the vendor's ability to reprice you.
What if my subscription costs go down?
Then set the increase to zero and rerun it. Even flat, a $12,000 a year stack is $120,000 over ten years against a $30,000 build you own outright. Subscription pricing going down is not the common case, but the argument does not depend on it going up.
What if the answer says keep renting?
Then keep renting. At low spend the calculator will tell you renting stays cheaper for the full ten years, and we will tell you the same thing on a call. Software you use lightly, or software in a category that changes every year, is usually worth renting. The case for owning is strongest on the systems your operation cannot run without.
How much does a custom build actually cost?
From $10,000, depending on scope. A single automation or a focused internal tool sits at the low end. A system that replaces four or five subscriptions and carries your whole operation costs more. Enterprise and multi-department builds go higher again. The calculator defaults to $30,000 because that is a realistic figure for replacing a small business software stack, and you can put a real quote in its place.
Can I spread the build cost out instead of paying up front?
Yes. We can structure a build so the monthly payment roughly matches what you already spend on the subscriptions it replaces, paid over two years, after which you own it outright and the payments stop. Your monthly cost does not change while you are paying it off. It goes to zero afterward.
Now do it on your real stack.
The calculator works off what you can remember. A teardown works off what you are actually paying. We go through the subscriptions one by one and send back a written breakdown: what is worth owning, what should stay rented, and what a build would cost.
Not ready to talk? Start with the Pilot Build: one workflow, fixed price, replaced first.