What is happening with licenses?

Posted by frankv1971@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 260 comments

I am in IT for almost 30 years but what I am experiencing with licensing is absurd. Every license that expires and needs a renewal has price increases of 40-100%. Where are the "normal" price increases in the past had been of 5-10% per year. A product we rely on has had an increase from 900 euro a year to 2400 euro in just 3 years. I was used to the yearly MS increases, that also are insane, but this is really starting to annoy me. Another move I see if from perpetual with yearly maintenance fees to subscription based. Besides the fact that if you decide not to invest in the maintenance fee anymore you can still use the older version, now the software will stop working. Lets not forget the yearly subscription is a price increase compared to the maintenance fees (sometimes the first year is at a reduced price, yippie). Same for SaaS subscriptions. Just yesterday I receive a mail from one of our suppliers. Your current subscription is no longer an option we changed our subscription model. We will move you to our new license structure. OK fine. Next I read on, we will increase the price with 25% (low compared to other increases) but then I read further, and we will move you from tier x to tier y which is 33% lower. (I am happy we never started with VMware though)

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260 Comments

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finnjaeger1337@reddit

cries in VFX software , same shit happening there.

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labs64-netlicensing@reddit

This is like subscribing to a flashlight: battery sold separately, and don’t forget you have to keep re-charging! ☝️

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robert_micky@reddit

30 years in IT here too, and this post hits hard. The 40-100% increases are absurd—we just got hit with a 75% jump on a tool we can't easily replace. The frustrating part: Most vendors send renewal notices 30-60 days out, which is too late to budget for these huge increases or explore alternatives. Question for the group: Do you track these renewals proactively (6+ months ahead) to have negotiation leverage? Or are you mostly reacting when the renewal email lands? I'm considering building a tool that gives you 90-day visibility + tracks year-over-year price changes per vendor. Trying to figure out if this is a tooling problem or if the real issue is just vendor monopolies leaving us no choice. Thoughts?

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Adventurous_Swim_365@reddit

As an IT manager, the majority of my job is now procurement, contracts and financial management surrounding the service delivery. My advice? Ensure you are remaining transparent with your customers on the services you are providing them and any forecasted changes to the pricing of said services. Write contracts in such a way where you believe the external vendor is evil and wants to pull a broadcom on you half way through the contract term. IT is no longer about technical excellence but rather risk reductions. The industry is going to experience a world of pain over the next decade, best you protect yourself now

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derfmcdoogal@reddit

Everyone watched Broadcom hand out 500% increases and thought they can get away with it too. What are you going to do, leave your ERP? Go back to postfix on premesis? Most vendors have their customers by the balls. My budget saw about an 18% increase overall even after ditching VMware.

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ThatDamnRanga@reddit

We've taken a two-pronged approach. \- Business systems: Stick to the standard. Strip unneeded features. Consolidate to fewer platforms. \- Operational systems: Discuss with vendors, let them know at the outset that based on their current pricing, we will be moving to an open source substitute immediately. So far all of them have canned their increases, but we've been shoved from a "support subscription" to "service subscription" model, so its just extended how long we have to make that migration.

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taw20191022744@reddit

What did you go with?

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djaybe@reddit

Except broadcom did not get away with it. They torched the customer base.

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derfmcdoogal@reddit

Now, sure. But they got a solid 2 years of large increases out of their low paying customers and will get another 5+ out of their huge high paying customer base. Win win.

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djaybe@reddit

No they didn't. I didn't give them shit and many many companies told them to pound sand.

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Ok-Bill3318@reddit

Sure but the big customers couldn’t move and paid up. Broadcom VMware is a short term ransomware strat. They know virtualisation is commodity now and there’s a limited time to extract as much revenue as possible. This is why workstation is free and vSphere is being milked for as much as possible. No doubt some bean counter figured that acquisition cost of VMware was less than the anticipated revenue they could extract form Fortune 500 over 5 years.

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nullvector@reddit

I can't argue with the logic. If all they care about is profit, they're probably doing the smart thing. I imagine in a few years they'll shrivel VMware into some shrunken prune and sell it to some other company.

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Ssakaa@reddit

They aren't even nice enough to do that. Look at the various Symantec products, Ghost, SiteMinder (definitely a product of its time, but still), etc. that languished and atrophied under their care.

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djaybe@reddit

Agreed.

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derfmcdoogal@reddit

Many more, didn't or had to wait at least a cycle to get it done.

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kuroimakina@reddit

This is why I constantly tell people to never put all your eggs in one basket, always have alternatives lined up, and always have a FOSS *option* on your radar. If you go all in on one company, and architect your systems in a way that they cannot be transferred/converted to something else, then you’ve just given your vendors carte blanche to do whatever they want. They know they have you by the balls, they *will* take advantage of you. Because like you said, what are you going to do at that point? Spend a thousand or more man hours trying to figure out how to wrestle everything into some new system that may not even hit all your stated “needs”? I’m sure management is going to go for *that*

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wideace99@reddit

Let the budget bleed ! It was a business decision to go the vendor lock-in way !

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Recent_Carpenter8644@reddit

They might cut IT staff to compensate.

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Ok-Bill3318@reddit

I’ve seen companies try that. It never works.

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AdmiralAdama99@reddit

It can take years for the damage of outsourcing, IT layoffs, etc to become obvious though. By then the exec responsible has already gotten their bonus and already taken their bulldozer to the next company. This pattern puts tech (including software dev) into nasty cycles of a few years of outsourcing -> a few years of fixing -> a few years of outsourcing -> a few years of fixing.

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Ssakaa@reddit

And, even better, we're coming off a few years of outsourcing and into a few years of outsourcing to AI.

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Ok-Bill3318@reddit

Also true

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wideace99@reddit

What IT stuff ? Those who claim there are too busy to self-host on-prem their own email server, but they lack the tech know-how for FOSS ? The IT&C industry is full of imposters since long time ago, their only purpose is to outsource all the tech & responsibility to others tech imposters called MSP's. Just take a look on the MSP's sub and the questions there to find out that they also outsource tech competency to multiple vendors. The vendors have outsourced to India its entire tech department since it's cheaper, and we all know how a good tech is Rajesh paid in bananas to survive to the next month. Rejoice ! A.I. is coming and is even cheaper than poor Indians since it can work 24/7 which no human can do, but its work it will be even crappier :) It's a time when no one seems to be willing to pay big bucks for competency :)

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Sandwich247@reddit

Replacing everyone with a vendor based in India is old beans The *real* sauce is replacing everyone with AI

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KingDaveRa@reddit

I don't know if they still do it, but British Telecom back in the 70s at least had a two vendor policy - if they were buying something, they had to have a second supplier. That way it was harder for them to suddenly crank up the pricing, knowing that BT were beholden to that one vendor. A smart move, I wish it was more possible in tech today.

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rainer_d@reddit

This falls flat with M365 - or MacBooks on the other side of the aisle. Who’s gonna replace Exchange with Zimbra? Who’s gonna replace Windows on the client and the server with Linux (and Libreoffice)? Microsoft knows this and they’ll slowly boil that frog until it’s done.

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KingDaveRa@reddit

We can all just use Groupwise instead! 😁

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lost_signal@reddit

The problem with this policy is you end up in weird situations where you don't adopt technologies because "Only one vendor does it, but it'll cut my hardware bill in half" It also doubles your Opex costs as now you need a F5 team and a Netscaler team.

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ianpmurphy@reddit

The idea that you can be so specialized that you are incapable of dealing with two products that do essentially the same seems crazy. There's nothing new under the sun. It was all invented 50 years ago, all that changes is the syntax of how to get there.

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changee_of_ways@reddit

How much is it going to cost you to jump between ERPs though, or ditch 365 for Google?

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Deep-Trick7995@reddit

Right

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Zombie13a@reddit

The problem is, even the alternatives are still in the cloud. Everyone thought the cloud was the greatest thing since sliced bread. "It's cheaper!" "It's more elastic" "It's more flexible" "No more hardware costs".... well guess what... now you put all the things you need under someone elses control and, as above said, they've got you by the balls and all you can do is pay pay pay. Want to access your app/data? Pay. Want to pull your data out and put it literally anywhere else? Oh...gotta pay for that too. Wanna double down and add more data? You guessed it, gotta pay. Now all the people that claimed on-prem was to expensive/rigid/slow/whatever are suddenly panicing because cloud went up 10000% (and on-prem went up too because private equity). Well, guess what, this is exactly what you wanted, you just didn't want to listen when we said it would happen. Now, I'mma go over there <points vaguely towards the corner> and nurse my coffee in peace. I promise I'm not bitter...

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TheReturned@reddit

And this is already being repeated with AI. From the "It's so great!" To the "We're going to save so much money!", it's just another level of lock-in, except instead of systems it's now all that data and training and learning it did on your data. You can't export all of that to another AI vendor, no, you have to start from scratch all over again so you stick with them and you have and eat the 1000% price increase. And just like cloud, businesses are backpedaling left and right, rehiring staff and reinstituting workflows that ai was supposed to do/handle/replace. And sadly, the MBAs will never learn and will repeat the cycle with the Next Big Thing.

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Zombie13a@reddit

I will \_NEVER\_ understand the 'lets feed it all of out data' mentality. Regardless of lock-in or cost, do you honestly believe that the AI company isn't going to use that data in a general sense?

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nullvector@reddit

I remember saying a lot of things 10+ years ago and being told that the cloud would never raise prices irrationally because they'd always have competition to worry about. No one ever thinks of the cost of implementation/migration of switching providers. Migration projects can be time consuming and grinding.

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Obi-Juan-K-Nobi@reddit

Can I finally say “I told you so?” to all my former CIOs and laugh a little?

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Ok-Bill3318@reddit

Yup

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False-Ad-1437@reddit

Good engineering includes the cost of disposal… this would mean considering the exit plan for any technology in IT

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Kyla_3049@reddit

This is it. ALWAYS back up critical data locally, and never use shit like Canva which doesn't let you download files in their native format or edit them in offline software. I am a student who lurks this sub and I always use PowerPoint instead of Canva because of this. If Canva shut down then my work would either be non-editable if backup up or gone if not backed up. A local copy of PowerPoint from a fixed release like Office 2024 will ALWAYS work as long as the PC that it's installed on works, or the drive can be booted on another PC.

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Darkhexical@reddit

Canva is more publisher than PowerPoint tho.

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lost_signal@reddit

This is why I constantly tell people to never put all your eggs in one basket, always have alternatives lined up, and always have a FOSS *option* on your radar. You mean like Terraform? Like Redis? Like Elastic? Like CentOS (yes it's still around, but it's no longer RHEL compatible replacement). If your wanting F0SS I'd stick to stuff not randomly dumped on the apache foundation that has 1 company doing 90% of development, and look for CNCF projects that have graduted. You can still use commercial software in that ecosystem, but stuff that's CNCF compliant with upstream will at least have some portability while you still get support and extensions that provide value. *If you go all in on one company, and architect your systems in a way that they cannot be transferred/converted to something else, then you’ve just given your vendors carte blanche to do whatever they want* What ERP do you run? Because ERP migrations tend to take years, and cost millions of dollars and I've yet to see a good open source one... At a certain point commercial software has value, and being a pure BSD license shop will require you have a bazillion extra staff to maintain everything and still end up with projects that get abandoned. **My suggestion as an alternative?** 1. SIGN long contracts. STOP doing yearly renewals. Buy software subscriptions that will largely co-term with your hardware, or the length your finance department has aligned with a project life. 2. Understand that your time is valuable. I once built my own storage array, and PBX and firewall. It was a nightmare to support, I lost 3 days of my life to a DRDB split brain, and supporting any outage while on vacation meant I got called. Sure there's some Austrians you can pay to support DRDB, but that's not what people generally do when they go down the free route, and say what you will about Oracle they pick up the damn phone at 3AM on christmas morning and fix their stuff. 3. Recognize the business cares more about predictability of outcome and costs, than ACTUAL costs. Again, longer contracts, do stuff that you can get support on or you can staff MULTIPLE SMEs on. 4. **Lean in to fewer vendors**. Your signing your Microsoft EA, GREAT. Nows a time to look and see if their security tooling can close some gaps. If you go for best of breed with 20 vendors your going to end up constantly fighting one of them on pricing. F5 renewal too high? Does another vendor also have a load balancer on their line card. Cisco wants too much for networking and splunk? Is there a good enough Syslog/SIEM on another vendors line card, and can you just buy switches from Dell while you get your servers from them? As long as your expanding the products from a vendor (and increasing their spend even by 10%) they will generally happily eat another vendors lunch who's a point solution.

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_araqiel@reddit

Good FOSS ERP? I wish. I’ve yet to see a good proprietary one either…

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lost_signal@reddit

Ok that’s fair 😂

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anxiousvater@reddit

Well, you should have management & colleagues who support such initiatives. I have a lot of boomers colleagues who won't give a shit if you come with Opensource tooling. They have 0 programming skills, so in-house solutions are out of reach. As a consequence, new teams popped up in offshore locations to do the same manual work such as patching & automations here & there. Management is happy as they don't pay hefty salaries to these out of touch boomers & save licensing costs. I can't believe we have 43 offshore colleagues to build, patch & maintain automation of 5k servers.

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lost_signal@reddit

*I have a lot of boomer colleagues who won't give a shit if you come with Opensource tooling. They have 0 programming skills, so in-house solutions are out of reach.* I know a shop who was successful with raw open source OpenStack at scale. They had 30 platform engineers and SREs. They saved $0 over (points at every other platform they could have gone with).

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anxiousvater@reddit

>They had 30 Silicon Valley platform engineers and SREs. That's the point, they had 30. In my team, it's mostly me. Even a simple FIM solution (plenty available online), they went with a licensed tool, that produces thousands of false positives. Anyways, I lost patience & interest working with such colleagues,.looking for a change.

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hamburgler26@reddit

Postfix? Please go all out and roll it back to sendmail, extra cool points for mega retro vibes.

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gnordli@reddit

I have a copy of the O'reilly bat book if anyone needs it.

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FortuneIIIPick@reddit

\> Go back to postfix on premesis? I run postfix on prem. Works great.

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RuncibleBatleth@reddit

Is postgrey all you need for inbound filtering these days or is there something more aggressive in front of the box?

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gnordli@reddit

I use assp for spam. It works great.

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FortuneIIIPick@reddit

I used postgrey for a while, at some point, something about how it operated bothered me so I stopped using it. I wrote my own spam blocker that checks things like the age of the sending domain, my whitelist of TLD's, and domain validation. In addition, I use header\_checks and body\_checks effectively (the rules can be tested with postmap -q). I don't use SpamAssassin any more, it's too cumbersome and inaccurate.

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SlapcoFudd@reddit

But that other guy mocked it!

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Dreilala@reddit

To be honest, on premise and open source seems to be the smart move by now. Actually quite a couple of big players are going down that route.

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Dizzy_Bridge_794@reddit

Yep just got screwed by Adobe this week

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hurkwurk@reddit

inflation. Gotta keep one eye on the market. companies will try to match an industry standard pricing model, and as already mentioned, with broadcoms massive price push, the market is now correcting to match.

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Vvector@reddit

Stocks don't buyback themselves. This is just Enshittification 101.

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lost_signal@reddit

OK, everyone keeps using that word and you don’t know what it means. **Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers (such as advertisers), and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.** You can just say “I don’t like higher prices”

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Real-Abrocoma-2823@reddit

It is still enshittification if prices are going up while quality declines.

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lost_signal@reddit

That would more generally be called skimpflation+shrinkflation. (Declining quality + reduced unit size per $, or price increase). Shrinkflation: This occurs when the price of a product remains the same or increases, but the quantity or size of the product decreases (e.g., smaller packaging for the same price). Skimpflation: A less formal term, skimpflation specifically describes when companies cut costs by reducing the quality of goods or services (e.g., using cheaper ingredients or reducing service staff) while maintaining or raising prices.

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Real-Abrocoma-2823@reddit

I'm not studying the entire Oxford dictionary for this, but thanks for correction!

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Phuqued@reddit

Black Mirror Season 7 : Episode 1 That is our future if we give up agency and ownership of things.

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Phuqued@reddit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTwJ4jHbEgE If you aren't going to watch check out the youtube video I'm linking.

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standish_@reddit

![gif](giphy|kkpcRessCvNyo) Probably about time to stop using those black mirrors.

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QuantumRiff@reddit

you also need to add in the cost of 'winning' with our tariffs in the US. all those laptops, servers, disk and SSD storage, and AI GPU's.. Yes, there have been deals cut for some companies here and there if they promse to start moving manufacturing here, but then again, those deals seem to constantly change.

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D0nM3ga@reddit

How do tariffs affect software licenses?

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meeu@reddit

The people who make a living making that software have to buy things. It's called inflation sweaty.

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nullvector@reddit

Sweaty inflation sounds like a band name.

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epicNag@reddit

A sweaty band name

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DDozar@reddit

The very short answer is the software they sell you runs on hardware. The longer answer would be that, as well as greed, opportunism, and knock-on effects throughout the economy.

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VTArxelus@reddit

It's all part of the plan. Heat up buying, then reduce every last dollar they can on taxes to make it so businesses are paying tariffs instead. Then the unemployed will have no choice but to take any job they can when the economy crashes, because otherwise the liquidity in businesses won't perform for practically zero. Except they really don't get what it's doing to the markets at large.

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Bimpster@reddit

But AI is going to make everything better soon.

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Antique_Grapefruit_5@reddit

I've been starting conversations with vendors lately in a very direct manner. Them: "We'd like to talk to you about your renewal". Me: "Oh Lord. Please no!" Me: "Do you know how much it sucks to be a customer at the moment. You keep increasing product costs while support gets worse and worse. It's inexcusable and you should be ashamed of yourselves..."

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LUHG_HANI@reddit

Dell did a 30 min introduction to the new products. I told them it was horrible and I don't understand why. I'm just blunt and to the point as they don't understand what we have to deal with.

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Darkace911@reddit

I blew up on a new PowerVault sales rep just this Friday. Why are you calling me? You keep killing the products that I want to buy.

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sirjaz@reddit

We all went to Cloud and SaaS. We eliminated on-prem software, and locked ourselves into these vendors. Salesforce was the one that really kicked things off. We need to go back to on-prem and native software. Stop depending on SaaS and webapps.

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tigglysticks@reddit

I saw this coming 12 years ago. No one listened to me.

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Chemical_Cheetah4273@reddit

You’re late to the game. It’s not just licensing. The same thing happened with HPE servers going from gen10+ to gen11, coinciding with their greenlake launch and pivot to ARR with the biggest payouts to VARs in the entire industry. Public cloud has created monopolistic datacenter landlords that have driven the price up for everyone else. It’s pretty obvious to see if you aren’t just chasing higher compensation and pushing vendor products to clients.

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jman1121@reddit

I blame EA sports. They started this. 😆

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KickedAbyss@reddit

I support this answer.

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zrad603@reddit

I started my IT career dealing with the cheapest of the cheap clients. I remember clients running MS Software that was past EOL to the point where it was hurting their employee productivity. I remember planning out: "Okay, if you upgrade to SBS 2011, and get Office 2010, that will cover everything until 2020. That ends up being less than $x per month." and trying to come up with a long term upgrade path for them. But not only was buying perpetual licenses cheaper in the long run, it was more stable and predictable from an IT management perspective: I had a client that was an early Office 365 adopter when it shipped with Office 2010 as a monthly subscription. They used Office 2010 plugins that was industry specific or helped integrate with other software they were running. Microsoft force upgraded Office 365 users to Office 2013, and there was even a FAQ that said "What if I need Office 2010 for comparability reasons?" and Microsoft basically responded: "Tough shit, if you need Office 2010 buy a separate license" I also remember I had a client that used MS Access. It was included in the "Small Business" Office 365 subscription tier they were using. When their contract was up for renewal, they discontinued the tier they were in, so to keep MS Access they needed to upgrade to an enterprise plan which was significantly more or buy a separate MS Access license. But all these clients decided to save money in the short run and get burned in the long run. You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy.

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LUHG_HANI@reddit

Fuck em. At that point I don't blame piracy. I understand what you went through as my customers did the same.

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zrad603@reddit

That was one of the things that irked me trying to run an MSP. I really try to do everything "the right way", and try to do things by the book. I really don't give a flying fuck if a client is pirating Microsoft software. It's not my job to be Microsoft's software license enforcer. However, I do have to advise them. Now, I remember doing upgrade projects, where Microsoft was going to be making way more money on the project than I was. A Microsoft Office license was hundreds of dollars per seat. Like I don't care if the client pirates it, but if my client gets busted, and I was the one who installed it, and pirated it for them, my professional reputation is on the line (or worst). I lost a few clients because they were trying to squeeze the shit out of every penny, and I was just trying to tell them what shit actually costs. They would find some "computer repair" guy who would just put some pirated software on the computers for them. I remember losing one client that was a law firm who had an intern who became their IT guy because he used to work for Best Buy. They literally installed the STUDENT version of Microsoft Office that said in the Window title "For Non-Commercial Use Only" https://preview.redd.it/ljt3fuljvurf1.png?width=957&format=png&auto=webp&s=4c3fdd7b555e766bb985e955d0e7055569993df7 and I remember saying: "If you're gonna pirate software, at least do it right, save some money, and go get the full featured version that doesn't say for 'non-commercial use' on it. and one of the employees there who I was friendly with, who understood everything I was saying forwarded me an email from a senior partner at the firm saying I was "trying to rip them off" and badmouthed me. and I know I would have never seen a penny as a reward if I reported them to the BSA, but maybe it would have felt good after that bridge got burned. I like doing tech stuff, but I just hate all the corporate bullshit of IT.

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LUHG_HANI@reddit

Hit the nail on the head. I believe law firms are possibly the cheapest. I remember the days adding 5 computers to 1 licence wether it was student or not. Then the 6th they would complain it can't be done and have to ring MS to phone activate.

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Kyla_3049@reddit

Exactly. Relaying on SaaS's will get you, as u/UCFknight2016's boss says, Broadcommed.

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Plenty-Hold4311@reddit

I agree, the main thing you want is stability. Then you get MS changing things on 365 and adding copilot everywhere even though nobody asked for it..

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zatset@reddit

That's why I rely on on-premises solutions and avoid subscriptions and cloud based stuff at all costs.

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Seditional@reddit

This seems to be a huge trend as private equity companies come to the end of their investment cycles, they need to pump their profitability. Interest rates are really high at the moment so they can’t cash out on their investments otherwise.

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ledow@reddit

As an industry, they have you tied into licences now. Prices increases are an "accept it or undo everything you've done up until now" deal. Their competitors are the same and they know that. You're running everything off their cloud and you have no alternative in-house. They know that too. So now that they have you tied in, they can do what they like on pricing. And because you have no alternative you can either obey their every whim... or you can go without. And they know that. Welcome to what we were all warning you about 25+ years ago. Enjoy your perpetual dependence for everything on a third party that determines what you have to pay.

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Lord_Dreadlow@reddit

Drug dealer's business model; get 'em hooked on your product and then raise the price.

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spyingwind@reddit

Just move on to another dealer each time, then all first hits are free!

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jake04-20@reddit

The first hit is free!

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3gaydads@reddit

This is such bullshit. I used to do loads of drugs and NO-ONE ever gave out free samples.

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davidflorey@reddit

Clearly hung with the wrong crowd then 😉

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anxiousvater@reddit

Unlike drug dealers, these licensing firms offer support at different levels which is very appealing to clueless management & boomers. In most cases there would be an Opensource clone but they pin-point trivial issues saying they are business critical. On top of that, those so-called tool experts get invited to company events every year in party locations such as Vegas, Amsterdam.

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mschuster91@reddit

>As an industry, they have you tied into licences now. The problem is fundamentally "one off" purchases just don't work any more, not in our times where we as customers have to be constantly on guard to update fast and often otherwise we get pwned, and it also doesn't work for developers because guess what, someone needs to pay for these security updates. On top of that we have Google, Microsoft and Apple c*onstantly* breaking shit and releasing updates all the time which break more shit which means someone needs to pay developers to keep up with the breaking shit, and if that were not enough at least in the mobile space the hardware vendors are breaking shit as well, and worse, *silently fixing shit* which means developing for mobile is an even worse hellscape than on desktop. IT started off on the government paying for a lot of shit (that's how the Internet got started) and academia paying for the rest (a looooooooooooooooooot of FOSS started off as research projects of some undergrad or whatnot), then we had a period of one off purchases of proper quality software/games (made necessary by there not being an Internet to distribute patches), followed by a period of advertising paying for shit that ended up hooking consumers on "shit must be free" business models on top of gacha shit, and now the advertising economy is collapsing and everyone else is moving to enshittification, all while AI slop is upending everything. Next years are sure gonna be one hell of a ride, all I know is I'm changing careers end of this year. Got enough of the rat race and I don't wanna be the last rat on the sinking ship before AI tanks IT entirely.

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lost_signal@reddit

*The problem is fundamentally "one off" purchases just don't work any more, not in our times where we as customers have to be constantly on guard to update fast and often otherwise we get pwned, and it also doesn't work for developers because guess what, someone needs to pay for these security updates. On top of that we have Google, Microsoft and Apple constantly breaking shit and releasing updates all the time which break more shit which means someone needs to pay developers to keep up with the breaking shit, and if that were not enough at least in the mobile space the hardware vendors are breaking shit as well, and worse, silently fixing shit which means developing for mobile is an even worse hellscape than on desktop* A major release for us requires spinning up something like 5 million nested containers and virtual machines. There's also far less cowboy IT going on inside at vendors as if we get pwned everyone gets pwnwed.

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mschuster91@reddit

Few people have that scale to be honest.

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lost_signal@reddit

They are a giant SaaS provider who pretty much everyone here hates their product.

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CowardyLurker@reddit

Very insightful, thank you.

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prehlb@reddit

I lived through the tech boom of the late 90's. Watching vendors command insane prices. 3Com, Cisco, Extreme Networks, Novell, Microsoft, and many others. I watched SEs jump companies and make huge commissions. And then it busted. And all of those people were back at the ground floor in salaries if they even had a job. I'm not sure what will happen now. My gut tells me the community and open source will start to take off. Companies will see value in providing support for those products. Until the cycle of it being bought out happens again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Welcome to tech.

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JosephMarkovich2@reddit

Greed.

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BlackV@reddit

Welcome to vendor lock in and saas monthly bills, gotta pay

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MrHanBrolo@reddit

Because what else are you going to do? Lol.

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enforce1@reddit

You know software licensing is make believe right?

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kagato87@reddit

It's all about rent seeking. Shareholders expect ever increasing profits, which is an issue when a market is saturated (worse when captivated). We see this in and out of IT all the time. It's getting ridiculous. And it's all driven by the investors. I work for a SaaS vendor owned by an investment company, and rhe push for profits from the top is crazy. It's also the lightest push from investors I've ever seen... (They just want to see that growth and pay bonuses based on it - no demanding triple returns for a new acquisition...)

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imcq@reddit

Take a hard stance on resisting this tactic. Seek out procurement partners that can leverage their collective buying power to get you better pricing. Despite all the headaches, be willing to talk to competitors, do their PoC, take their better pricing proposal back to your supplier and tell them to sharpen the pencil or get fucked. There is so much markup in tech, hardware and software, that it makes me sick to see people paying MSRP on this stuff while their customers are out there squeezing every other cost to make single digit profits. Go look at sales salaries in tech. We should all go start selling because we know most companies are too laze and cheap to jump ship.

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ThatLocalPondGuy@reddit

What was warned at the advent of cloud SaaS by every human with open eyes and business computing management experience. That's what is going on

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Low-Opening25@reddit

open source exists

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SAD-MAX-CZ@reddit

And is getting into "Very easy to use" territory.

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aethelworn@reddit

I remember me in my naiveness trying to call broadcom when shtf was still fresh lmao

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shimoheihei2@reddit

Support open source alternatives. Don't give in to overpriced licensing.

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Long_Start_3142@reddit

Oh that? That's just the economy losing its ever loving mind

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InsolentDreams@reddit

Yeah I agree. I had this happen to a service a while ago that TRIPLED their monthly price. I emailed them and told them bullshit I want to use their service and I signed up for a monthly fee and a contract for a specific amount and it’s amount to false advertisement and bait and switch and basically told them to go screw themselves. I said I’d be happy to continue paying the fee I agreed to or a reasonable increase. That actually worked for me and let me continue on the pricing plan I was on. You can’t win them all but I felt quite happy to be able to fight some of that bullshit.

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sidewinded@reddit

What happened is these companies are ok with doubling the price and losing 30-40% of their customer base. They're making more money and doing less work. Problem is money went a little silly over the last 5 years and there's just way more of it and it's circling around the corporate gravity wells of money sucking soullessness that is corporation run economies. You can pay more therefore you will pay more.

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Wolfram_And_Hart@reddit

Adobe rep is really upset I have an intern account set up for the 1 intern we hire every year. Trying to get me to admit to something nefarious. I finally said “Would it be easier if I just assign the license to a new person every 6 months?” Just get off my junk dude you’re getting your $500 a month already.

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CrystalSoulx@reddit

Smartsheet is a good example of license enshittification. Used to be you only needed licenses for users creating sheets, but you did not need a license to edit a sheet you were invited to. Starting this year all users need a license. They did this to "adapt to market trends". Feels like highway robbery.

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Smooth-Zucchini4923@reddit

On the bright side, this is great for IT employment. Think of all of the companies running VMware migrations. That takes a lot of time. We used to have with labor saving software. Now we are doing software saving labor. Good if you're selling labor!

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cmillerIT007@reddit

Before we switch to any vendor all of our contracts have it written in them that the vendor can’t increase their price by more than 5% per year. We have had to send it back to some vendors, but they end up honoring it and that ended up protecting us pretty good.

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einstein-314@reddit

Are you all seeing the same happening for CAD and Engineering applications? I heard of a renewal of one recently and it made my jaw drop.

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emilyv99@reddit

Out of principal I will never touch an ms office subscription. You had no reason to make that a subscription, Microsoft. Enshittification.

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waxwayne@reddit

In some instances it may just be cheaper to write your own software. I recently had this talk with a large hospital group with 100k cameras. They were looking for a video system and I said the licensing would be immense just write your own VMS.

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ImCaffeinated_Chris@reddit

I had a meeting yesterday about using some basic stuff to create a whole solution for a customer bc the licensing for a product they are using doesn't scale cost effectively. Businesses are starting to look for alternatives.

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waxwayne@reddit

I think AI vibe coding is going push this forward.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

I dont write software per se, but I do script a lot of automations and reporting systems for our business, along with many scripted tools. Probably saves us days of work per month. Most problems you buy software to solve are problems that a competent hobby programmer could solve as well. Many tasks and tools you install and run on your systems are just shiny wrappers on top of tools and APIs that already exist on a platform. Its kindof an 'ignorance tax' of sorts.

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Papashvilli@reddit

You buy a license for 50% more or you buy a different companies equipment for 100% more. Most finance departments don’t care about license costs over a 5 year period, they just need to know how much you need this year and if you don’t need it next year then you lose it.

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ImightHaveMissed@reddit

Most business leaders don’t realize infinite growth is not possible

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bingle-cowabungle@reddit

Yes they do. We need to stop pretending that these executives just don't know what they're doing. Infantilizing them just removes their agency, and allows them to pretend like they were clueless. The real issue here is that they are capitalizing on their own personal bonuses, and enshittifying until their companies collapse, and they can abandon ship with their golden parachutes, and let the VC company that buys the place clean up the mess or sell it for parts.

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Ok-Bill3318@reddit

Broadcom know exactly what they’re doing. It’s just that their strategy does not include long term vSphere existence.

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anxiousinfotech@reddit

More realistically, they are fully aware, but they realize that they'll get fired by the private equity overlords if they don't act like it is, even if it destroys the business in the process.

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punkwalrus@reddit

I'm going to say, having seen corporate life for almost 40 years, that most don't know or plan for anything. Most don't have a "big plan" or understand anything other than the next hop of their selfish aims. A lot of middle management is about "flexibility" and agility, and that means no long term goals. A majority of business leaders were lucky on top of that: right place, right time, and many are just there because money from others put them there. They are more figureheads who become convinced of their leadership, but don't really know what they are doing. So, I'd say a majority are not "aware." There's no grand plan or plan at all. Just day to day, following the trends, adrift in a stream, destined to die in obscurity. Think about all the top managers in the late 1800s Hell, 1950s. How many do you know their names? A handful? How many companies from that era still exist? "Recognizing infinite growth isn't--" and I'll stop you are "recognizing." Yes, a few people have long term strategies and are brilliant generals in the war of business, but they are not the majority, and they don't always succeed, either. You could do all the right things and still fail.

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Kyla_3049@reddit

For a business to truly last, it needs to not be chasing infinite profit gain. A company which has a ~$1M profit every year with no investors who want more and more every quarter is a company that has full control of itself and is almost destined to last for decades.

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itskdog@reddit

Tbf, Intel's last CEO \*did\* have a big plan, and warned it would take a long time to implement, then got kicked out after 3 years before many of his decisions even hit the market.

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Bogus1989@reddit

exactly. they only plan for the next quarter

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punkwalrus@reddit

And that's what a lot of business schools are teaching managers. Like they are openly aware of the short term goals. And really, hard to find a compelling argument against it.

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LadyK1104@reddit

Seeing this happen from the inside is absolutely insane. Charging more for less, while reducing support staff. Then promoting vaporware for Gartner points.

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lost_signal@reddit

*Seeing this happen from the inside is absolutely insane. Charging more for less, while reducing support staff. Then promoting vaporware for Gartner points.* Weirdly enough Gartners stock is I think the worst performing on the Nasdaq this year.

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lost_signal@reddit

Private equity in software actually isn't doing very well right now. Insight was marking down investments and trying to raise new vintages and struggling because of lack of capital return on their portfolio. (That's a lot of storage and backup companies they own). [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-09-22/private-equity-firms-fundraising-stumbles-after-high-flying-era](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-09-22/private-equity-firms-fundraising-stumbles-after-high-flying-era)

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DrunkenGolfer@reddit

I called the Broadcom fiasco over a decade ago. They were gaining market share at a linear rate. I said they would soon own most market share and run out of market share to claim. They would add additional value-added layers but eventually, to appease shareholders who had become accustomed to meteoric growth, they’d have to put is huge increases or cash out. They cashed out to Broadcom, who had no reservations about fucking over clients.

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jaymemaurice@reddit

It all went to shit when they bought Nicira for $1.26bn triggering the further enshitification poisoning the EMC and Cisco relationship and leading to the Dell buyout.

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lost_signal@reddit

hold on. You are saying, VMware was AT IT"S BEST when: *\*Reads notes\** "The Nexus 1000V was around, and the vBlock was the solution to deploying a private cloud" ?!?!? ![gif](giphy|WRQBXSCnEFJIuxktnw)

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the_worm_store@reddit

In the SaaS business it's far worse than infinite growth; it's an insane benchmark known as "rule of 40" where revenue growth and profit margin need to add up to 40% (a completely arbitrary metric and number). A child could do the math on how this is totally unrealistic and unsustainable, but I don't think the spreadsheet warriors have quite figured out that the gold rush era of SaaS is pretty much over. You can just add all that bad debt used for software company M&A to the mountains of debt everywhere, and likelihood that AI is a huge bubble too. I think sysadmins that are deeply involved with administering, using, and procuring SaaS platforms are uniquely qualified to understand the enshitification trajectory of all of it. I would laugh, except it's a giant bomb that will probably make it impossible for most people to retire, probably even tank the entire economy into a forever stagflation at this point.

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cryptme@reddit

But if you can milk the cow today, why wouldn’t. If the company fails, they just move to another company.

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theservman@reddit

Makes me want to bring everything back in house and migrate to open source just out of spite. Probably a good thing for the business that I'm not in charge.

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Anonymity_Is_Good@reddit

A repeat of the 'all prices go up to full MSRP' scenario from 2008?

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mohammadmosaed@reddit

One word: electricity

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MentalSewage@reddit

Its those tarriffs on imports. Devs got too used to 3rd party libraries

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No_Resolution_9252@reddit

What do you think is paying for the massive hikes in wages and health insurance costs from the last 4 years?

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Background-Slip8205@reddit

You realize there's been significant inflation as of late, correct?

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Illthorn@reddit

Private Equity has changed the landscape. Their first move is to get rid of perpetual licensing. Then change what is licensed to something that can be metered. Dynatrace has 4 different vectors to charge you on. Host units(determined by ram * hours used) for servers, metrics(anything calculated), logs, and finally queries using their inbuilt query language. I'm sure there are more that feed into those categories but those are the big buckets. Behind every licensing move, look for when the company got bought by Private Equity.

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Helpjuice@reddit

Have to show quarterly profits, this is what those Analysts keep wanting quarter after quarter with unlimited growth which is unrealistic and causes moves like this versus focusing on long term growth and being strategic for the long term 10, 20, 50, 100 years.

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noodlyman@reddit

And I find that whenever I renew a subscription they do it wrong. I get the wrong number of licenses, sometimes for the wrong product, or applied to the wrong account, and it all takes about a week of phonecalls and emails to get it corrected.

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LUHG_HANI@reddit

Room temp IQ employees.

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paleologus@reddit

You need a better VAR.

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frankv1971@reddit (OP)

This also 🤬

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taintedcake@reddit

We paid $30k/yr for a program 3 years ago. We just paid $130k for the same program with a lower quantity.

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Creative-Dust5701@reddit

Just wait till the inevitable national disaster takes the internet down for a few weeks and your company can’t bill or provide services or products because the cloud has blown away like the big fluffy ones in the sky…

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PsiReaper@reddit

I could be wrong but I like to thank Broadcom for starting this trend.

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MonkyDeathRocket@reddit

I have had some luck saying ok, we will not renew our contract, but unfortunately those ones that you really actually need, they know it.

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RandomGen-Xer@reddit

Yeah, be thankful you never went the vmware route. Amazing product, but Broadcom has gone bananas with the pricing models.

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UCFknight2016@reddit

My boss has a new term called ‘broadcomming’ it’s where you 3x your renewal and force yourself into a three-year contract

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Fish_hippy_too@reddit

Fraudcom

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saxmaster896@reddit

Saving this for later use lmao

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UCFknight2016@reddit

Well, we got broadconned by solarwinds earlier.

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MeatPiston@reddit

Labor and other input costs are up, but the dirty secret is that companies don’t mind inflation because they and jack up prices as consumers expect higher prices. But yeah services providers are high as fucking balls if they think we won’t yank everything back on site. Servers and software still exist.

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Nicoloks@reddit

Better put everything back to on-prem now?

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Outrageous_Device557@reddit

They trap you in the cloud and nickel and dime you then raise prices at a steady rate. In 10 years we will probably all be going back on prem.

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Jellovator@reddit

Ivanti EPM changed from FTE license model to device-based licensing. We went from paying for 150 full time employees to paying for almost 900 devices (small college campus), about a 400% increase in cost for us. (Also glad we were never on VMware.)

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psych0fish@reddit

I dealt with a lot of enterprise slop but LANdesk/ivanti was by far the worst. Insanely over priced for how buggy and slow and broken their software is. They were incapable of fixing any issues and only employed sales and marketing people. They would acquire products and let them rot. Total trash company. The day we migrated away from their busted endpoint manager to MS config manager was a such a glorious day.

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Exkudor@reddit

Fuck Ivanti in particular. Soo many bugs and vulnerabilities, the product limps along on its best day and now they are also expensive.

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burnte@reddit

The vast majority of it is opportunistic profit taking using a lot of excuses, market forces like Broadcom on the exteme end, and economic disruptions like the US tariffs. It's just profit taking.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

Broadcom going for the prosumer and big business. Now that they've reduced their products' footprint in the market to only big spenders, they better be on their game. There are many really great virtualization products out there and if they blink, they may lose everything. Tell some executive officers that they can save hundreds of millions by using a different product other than vmware, they may give the go ahead.

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burnte@reddit

With the way Broadcom is managing VMware, they're acting more like CA buying up legacy products. CA buys big software with legacy customers and milks them until the customers slowly transition away over the course of many years. VMware grew by giving away ESXi meaning hundreds of thousands of sysadmins would play with it at home and in small businesses. That meant hundreds of thousands of PRETRAINED ADMINISTRATORS were already out there! Training is the hardest part of any stack, and being able to sell it to people who already know how to use it means a lot of those people will simply recommend VMware because they already know it. CA was "milk the long tail" while VMware was "give away the first taste". Now with a huge on-prem repatriation wave coming VMware has positioned themselves as the choice of LAST resort, rather than first. Other virtualizers are going to reap the benefits. I think Broadcom will have a terrible time making back the nearly $70bn they spent. Yeah VMware had just shy of $14bn revenue in 2023, $21bn in 2024, and this year I wager it'll be high, but I think next year it'll be down, down each year after that, and most importantly **revenue is not profit**. I think after 5-7 years Broadcom will try to sell VMware for around $25bn tops.

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wideace99@reddit

Not happy ? Develop in-house your own software ! :)

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Fallingdamage@reddit

I love how you will tell vendors or sales people that you develop in house and they treat you like some sort of company pet or a worse joke. The idea that companies could develop their own solutions somehow makes them leadership you wouldnt take seriously. Not quite the same, but we shopped for phone systems for a while last year and salespeople really balked at the idea that we would want to self-host. Well, we did it. Decent product with plenty of API access so we built our own software around the gaps and have complete control of the system. We were paying nearly $60k a year for our last hosted system. Setup for the new one was $50k and but now we pay $20k a year for our own hosted VoiP system and thats only because we saved so much damn money on the project that administration let us bring in a 1g full duplex fiber line as well; still saving us more than 50% a year.

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uptimefordays@reddit

Honestly a few things. One labor costs keep increasing so it’s less feasible to just sell software when you can instead guarantee revenue with subscriptions. Two guaranteed revenue is great for businesses so leaders push it as much as possible. Three many organizations wanted to switch from CapEx to OpEx in the 2010s and we’re now seeing the long term effects of those choices.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

Maybe an alternative to the subscription model would be a 'pay for what you use' model? I do some hobby photography here and then and used to have an adobe creative cloud sub for photoshop and illustrator. I didnt use it much and ended up cancelling my sub and buying affinity photo instead. Good software for the value. I still like adobe, but not for $30 a month. Now, if only they could come up with an option for people like me who only use their software sparingly. Instead, they dont want my money at all, instead of some of it.

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jooooooohn@reddit

Don’t forget about pro-rating or partial refunds becoming almost gone. “Feel free to keep using the product until your billing cycle ends.” Nope just give me a refund thanks.

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Sandwich247@reddit

The global economy isn't so much being flushed down the toilet, but rather it's already bypassed the sewage filtration plants and went straight into the ocean Nobody really want's to acknowledge it, hoping that all the money being invested into bubbles will keep things afloat indefinitely

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ItsMeMulbear@reddit

Wait until the recession hits and companies can no longer afford the subscription on their business critical software. SaaS is gonna drive us into another great depression

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zrad603@reddit

and it's not just the software licensing. The last recession was when the big push to "The Cloud" began. I remember I had a law firm client, who had a client that was a small mortgage company that went out of business. Years later, the owner of the mortgage company was getting sued, and luckily for him, he still had the servers and desktops from his business sitting in his garage. I was able to go in there, find the documents he needed to prove his case and win in court. If these documents had been "in the cloud" they would have been lost years ago. But in the last recession, I had so many clients that were chugging along with servers and software that were waaaay past EOL. You had to make due. and to this day, we have on-prem workloads that would cost an absolute fortune to move to "The Cloud".

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Fallingdamage@reddit

C suite love opex. They hate to invest in their companies.

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Plenty-Hold4311@reddit

Very cool story, it’s funny because if you go over to the MSP forum you’ll have people calling you stupid for not moving everything to the cloud, it doesn’t matter what you’re actually trying to solve or do what’s best for the client!

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tdreampo@reddit

Yes! I get downvoted all the time there for saying that on prem has some significant benefits.

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asdfasdfasfdsasad@reddit

In a crowd full of people who's job relies on everything being in the cloud then the cloud providers are going to downvote the hell out of anybody pointing out that there are options that are much better for the client. That's because they want what's best for them, not for the client.

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qlz19@reddit

Yeah, that’s because it’s filled with scummy sales people and their SE’s…

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ImCaffeinated_Chris@reddit

I'm a cloud architect, and I believe not everything belongs in the cloud. I hate lift and shift to cloud without refactoring. Proper solutions on the cloud should REDUCE costs, not increase.

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lost_signal@reddit

*I hate lift and shift to cloud without refactoring.* It took 10 years for netflix to shutdown their last on prem datacenter and pedantically they still physically build CDN nodes and run their own BGP edges. Without Super AI, it's going to be 30 years before everyone can refactor everything, and the payback for anything that isn't actively being iterated is going to take that long. *Proper solutions on the cloud should REDUCE costs, not increase.* I have some friends who sell for AWS, and weirdly they don't get happy if you try to cut your bill in half at renewal of commitment.

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itskdog@reddit

Our Microsoft costs only increased moving to M365 A3 (which charges per staff user) over our OVS-ES subscription (which gives unlimited volume licences & CALs for Windows, Office LTSC, and Server based on FTE count) as someone a long time ago low-balled our FTE count when the school was much smaller and we were slowly increasing it with each renewal to try and get it accurate without setting off any alarm bells at Microsoft.

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anxiousvater@reddit

Not in our firm. My team proudly patch 5k servers & this is appreciated by management. Most of these servers aren't databases but Nginx, Haproxy & jump hosts lol 😂. Almost all VM filesystems are manually setup post provisioning & many such atrocities.

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zrad603@reddit

100%. If I were designing a new web application, it would totally be "serverless" cloud architecture.

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dllhell79@reddit

This was why we came very close to moving off of Docusign until they finally came to their senses and offered a more reasonable price. Pricing had more than doubled within like 2 years.

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tankerkiller125real@reddit

We did drop Docusign, the cost of purchasing a Document Signing certificate? $800/yr. The cost of storing said certificate in a GCP backed HSM? Pennies per month relativly speaking. The cost of hosting our own Documenso instance tied to that certificate? Literally 30 minutes of time, and a deployment to our existing container infrastructure.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

Our faxing service allows us to send a secure email with a document, have the recipient sign it digitally, and bounce it back to us for archiving and printing without needing any big 'docu' service to do it. Options exist. People just get blinder on the big guys.

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wastedcoconut@reddit

Have you priced Pandadoc? It’s a pretty solid platform. I like it.

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Disturbed_Bard@reddit

If you don't need the faf and just need a signature done Dropbox sign isn't that bad at all

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en-rob-deraj@reddit

Ive been paying the same price for Docusign for the last 3 years. They are pushing IAM though. It would cost us more switching to that model.

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BrainWav@reddit

Gotta pay for those useless AI initiatives somehow

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Dal90@reddit

Personal side of things...hosting company I had for maybe even longer than 25 years I think started at $120/year. Multiple sales later...in 2017 they were at $17.95/month and I wasn't happy but didn't bother. That's $23.95 in 2025 dollars. They hit $49.95/month in August. And when I went to cancel they popped up with a new logo next to their name...Network Solutions. Spun up a Proton Mail / Cloudflare / AWS replacement I'm guessing will be about half the cost when everything settles down. ...its been pure laziness to stay there as long as I had; while all that stuff was moving around I also cleaned out my Gmail. Found a few old ones and while I knew I had spun up EC2 instances in 2008 for organization I was working at, I forgot I had also spun up a S3 webhosting site in February and added Cloudfront on 11/25. Cloudfront was made public by AWS on 11/17. I'd make a joke about not always having worked where I'm mired in a bottomless swamp of technical debt ... but then realized that old hosting company of mine was personal technical debt.

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dalgeek@reddit

>Besides the fact that if you decide not to invest in the maintenance fee anymore you can still use the older version, now the software will stop working. That's just lost revenue as far as the vendor is concerned. Perpetual licenses mean you never have to upgrade if the current version meets your needs. So many orgs are happy to forego maintenance contracts and security updates if it means they don't have to pay another dollar beyond the initial purchase. I have customers that just stopped using Windows 7 last year because of some stupid app dependency. This has had a huge impact in the network world because people used to buy a base switch, possibly put an upgraded image on it (illegally), then use it for 10 years or until it physically dies. If they never have to call the vendor for support then the vendor has no idea. Once the switch dies they replace it with a gray market switch and repeat. Now that switches and routers are mostly subscription based beyond the most base functionality, and you can't upgrade it without registration, orgs are now forced to buy the license and maintenance that matches what they need.

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discosoc@reddit

As much as I want to say companies are greedy and whatnot, a lot of this is just a matter of a decade of "quantitative easing" policy kept prices artificially low and allowed companies and pricing strategies with barely any profit to exist. Pricing is having to catch up with the realities of an economic environment where you can't borrow money for nearly nothing, which means you can't operate in a perpetual state of "loss lead" until growth makes up the difference.

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trueppp@reddit

50% greed, 50% abuse. I know a lot of companies that would keep a support contract on 1 device and use that to update all their devices (Ex, my old employer, an MSP would keep support for 1 Fortinet device and install the firmware updates on our 200 other devices, same thing for VMware of Veeam)

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Nnyan@reddit

We are not seeing these types of jumps (we are no longer on VMware) for any of our vendors. It's been almost 50-50 between no increase and within the normal range. Which products are you seeing this in?

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scottwsx96@reddit

Try to put terms in the agreements that limit future renewals to some % increase. It helps avoid this! We’ve been successful getting as low as 3%, most will only go down to 5%, a few won’t go lower than 8%, a few won’t accept any limit.

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fdeyso@reddit

They’ll remove half the functions from your version and call the new one “enterprise” for double the price and they’ll pretend the “base” version is used by millions of home users so you need to buy the enterprise one.

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scottwsx96@reddit

It’s possible some vendors will pull SKU shenanigans. Most of the time, in my experience, they operate in good faith and honor the agreement. There really isn’t a downside in trying to include this language Z

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Philly_is_nice@reddit

I work in a lab. Real niche software, not other options without major workflow changes. Our renewals for this year are fucking absurd.

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Kyla_3049@reddit

Push them heavily and threaten to leave if they don't offer a better price.

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Philly_is_nice@reddit

Between our pestering and finance we have secured some modest discounts. But, we don't have a good comparable for some, and our researchers (like all researchers and end users generally) hate change and have dug into their positions. It being a three way conversation makes stuff tricky, but that ultimately on our execs to sort out.

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ScroogeMcDuckFace2@reddit

enshittification

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Dry_Inspection_4583@reddit

Oh it's all over the place, at this point you're better off investing in the people and training on FOSS solutions. New age capitalism is about attract and extract, proof is VMWare.

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Roseking@reddit

The one that pissed me off not that long ago was a pressure vessel calculator software our engineering department needs. They got rid of the lowest tier of the software, forcing anyone on those tiers to pay a much higher price. The justify it as customers getting more features. But we don't use them. That is why we bought the lower tier. We are up nearly 5 times the cost it was from before that change. Unfortunately the competitors are also around the same price now, so we are just stuck. It wasn't worth them having to relearn new software for a small savings.

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frankv1971@reddit (OP)

\>> It wasn't worth them having to relearn new software for a small savings. Exactly that. If I introduce an alternative people have to relearn the new software and that also an investment. I guess vendors know that and count on the fact that people will not switch because of that.

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lost_signal@reddit

By the time you learn the new software that vendor will just spike their renewal.

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pmmlordraven@reddit

You will own nothing and be happy. Perpetual licenses have been going away for years now. You need them more than they need you. Our SCADA vendor actually refused to renew us because we are too small and not worth the time it takes to even have to communicate with us quarterly.

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ReptilianLaserbeam@reddit

Management don’t like open source until the new licensing hits from the big names. Then they start considering it hahahahaha

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ocgeekgirl@reddit

In academia, software is moving towards named-user as opposed to floating network license. It’s a pain in the ass and more expensive.

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HLKturbo@reddit

the big players are nickel and diming every single aspect of it and companies are violently trying to sell crap most companies don't even need...

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AdhesiveTeflon1@reddit

It's extremely ridiculous. I manage an AEC company and AutoCad licenses have gone through the roof. To force people off concurrent licenses to named users, they doubled the price of concurrent licenses. ArcGIS, no more perpetual licenses with yearly maintenance, only subscription. ProjectWise, named licenses.

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bravojavier@reddit

We're having VMware headaches as well. What are you switching to, if you don't mind me asking?

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AdhesiveTeflon1@reddit

Sure, we're going to Proxmox. We have a simple small-med business setup though, no data center stuff, and we got brand new dell r660xs servers for Proxmox to go on.

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AtlanticPortal@reddit

People keep paying for those licenses. Why not?

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CtrlAltDefrag@reddit

It used to be predictable, 5–10% per year, and now it feels like a constant money grab.

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aeroverra@reddit

Nothing we can do. You can either stress out about it or relax knowing one day it will all implode.

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BituminousBitumin@reddit

If it makes sense to jump ship, do it. I've had some luck negotiating with vendors who've tried this. The others have been replaced. Zoom is a good example. They tried to force us into a different SKU that contained a bunch of useless features mid-contract. Our 3-year contract is up in March, and we will be scaling back to fewer than a dozen licenses. We used Zoom for telehealth. We replaced the things we were doing with Zoom with MS Teams and some associated Teams apps. It's actually a better solution, and we're already paying for it. Zoom can go to hell.

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ProgRockin@reddit

We cut our zoom licensing way back with the subscription changes, too. I hope most did and it hurts them, fuck Zoom.

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BituminousBitumin@reddit

Who wants to use Zoom for office productivity software? Who's idiotic idea was that?

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tdreampo@reddit

We built our own Jitsi servers in the cloud and control the whole stack. It’s awesome.

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frankv1971@reddit (OP)

I tried not to name and shame companies but I get you as we also use Zoom.

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reelznfeelz@reddit

Why not name and shame? I don’t get that. It’s not a lie to say “adobe increased licensing 30 percent on us”. It’s not slander. We should be open about this and work as a community.

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BituminousBitumin@reddit

There's no reason not to name and shame. You're not working for these scumbags

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frankv1971@reddit (OP)

Also I am looking at replacements, some worked some are hard to replace or the replacement somehow ends up being expensive again after a takeover. For instance I removed Solarwinds products completely and then they buy a SaaS product we use.

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Mindless_Software_99@reddit

To combat this issue, we began developing the software we need internally. Luckily, with the advent of AI assistant coding, we've been able to speed up development. It's time for small businesses to look for ways to develop tools internally.

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Nxo@reddit

I know, modern software licensing is super intuitive. All you need is a PhD in economics, a minor in astrology, and a Ouija board to figure out whether you’ll blow past your committed spend this quarter. Just factor in capacity, hours in the day, and whether the stars aligned at precisely 3:47 AM, and then, maybe, you’ll almost understand your bill. Who wouldn’t want to spend their time divining usage patterns instead of, you know, actually using the software?

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fdeyso@reddit

They made everything into a subscription, now they basically just set the price they want.

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its_mayah@reddit

It’s starting to kill me a little bit. All these $3000 a year software licenses for my two person shop really adds up. Our software spend has increased $$7-8000 in the last few years and we haven’t added anything new.

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anon-stocks@reddit

It' the McDonalds/chipotle model. Chipotle publicly said they're raising prices and they're aware they'll get less customers but overall they'll make the same amount or even more being able to scale other things back. Broadcom followed the same model. Less customers = Less staff + higher fees = Higher profit short term. Since inflation is HIGH as HELL they can hide this and call it inflation, reality is every company is doing this. Less chips per bag + higher price = less product to buy and make.

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Weak_Cheesecake3127@reddit

Recession...

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Horde_Of_Kittens@reddit

"We've talked about it internally, and we decided that we would really like for you to give us more money."

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m4tic@reddit

SHAREHOLDERS MUST BE SATISFIED!

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RetroactiveRecursion@reddit

Now that they got most people and orgs to hand over their data and services to be rented back to them, and many likely dismantled chunks of their internal infrastructure, they know that have you by the dongles.

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Haelios_505@reddit

I imagine they've all stuck so much money into the AI bubble that they're trying to recoup the costs via license increases. That's just my theory.

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Ok_Weight_6903@reddit

you are all at fault for handing everything you can to the cloud/SAAS without fighting for a measly second to stop the obviously inevitable result. I can ride this out, good luck to any young folks stuck in this shit, before long you'll be replaced by MSP since 95% of everything will be in the cloud and the IT costs skyrocketed so much that internal staff is just not affordable anymore.

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qlz19@reddit

Sounds like you don’t have a reseller you can trust. You should not be paying the increases these companies propose. Yeah, they will try but your reseller should be fight on your behalf. I’ve kept nearly all renewal increases below 10% for nearly everything. Your reseller brings you a renewal quote to discuss and you say “wow, no thanks”. Your reseller brings a replacement solution at a much better price. Then your reseller uses that to get better pricing from the incumbent. Magically you are now only paying a 5-10% increase with an option of locking in pricing on a longer term for a multiyear agreement. That’s just the way it works. Only morons pay the first quoted price…

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Cyber_Faustao@reddit

That's kinda of an obvious result given the incentives provided. If the measure of success in the socio-economic landscape is how much a company is worth in dollars, and how much that pool of money is growing over time, then that is what is going to be the target (metric) being optimized for. Furthermore, this growth is expected to be endless, unbounded, even though there's a finite number of people alive at any point of time in the world. And even then, only a fraction of these people are interested in your product. Therefore, the metric of success (S) is a product of how many people buy your product and how much they pay for it (SUCCESS=People*CostOfPurchace). Since the number of people is fixed/slowly growing, the only way to rapidly increase SUCCESS is making the cost of purchase higher and higher. And also, this success metric is strongly biased towards short term I'd say, so there's little incentive to making stuff better long term. One way to break this cycle would be... using Free and Open Source software, stuff that even if the manufacturer goes away, you still can run your software, or even find another company willing to take the gauntlet of maintaining it and selling support for it.

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Supermathie@reddit

> Just yesterday I receive a mail from one of our suppliers. Your current subscription is no longer an option we changed our subscription model. We will move you to our new license structure. OK fine. Next I read on, we will increase the price with 25% (low compared to other increases) but then I read further, and we will move you from tier x to tier y which is 33% lower. Wow, our company is incredibly generous by allowing customers to stay on their original pricing for years and pushing through ~2% increases YoY.

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Robbbbbbbbb@reddit

SaaS isn't some infinite money glitch like businesses seem to think. Broadcom did it and decision-makers started frothing when folks started paying. There's going to be a push from cloud to on-prem again soon enough to justify high licensing costs for physical infrastructure and to offset subscriptions. And thus, the cycle continues...

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HorrimCarabal@reddit

Simple cash grab from ‘locked in’ clients

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SoonerMedic72@reddit

Had a vendor who we were one of their first customers of in the early 00s. We use two of their products, one heavily and we integrated their flagship product as well but barely used it. All hosted on-prem. They call us to give reference calls to potential customers. We were paying roughly $8K a year for both products combined. Couple years ago, they informed us that they decided their flagship product is actually extremely under priced and we had only had minor increases when the software costs more for new customers. New quote for the two products was $95K. The product we actually use was going from $1.5K to $6K. We shucked their flagship and now they make $2K less every year to not let us use the software we used to host and barely use. When their off boarding tech "disabled" services for us he literally just took control in a Teams meeting, grabbed a single DLL, placed it in the recycle bin, and said "please be sure to not restore this DLL" with the biggest shit-eating grin I have ever seen. I am guessing he isn't a fan of the new CEO 😂

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Agreeable-While1218@reddit

US dollar is currently exporting inflation the world over. Decades of deficit spending and massive money printing gets us here. It is inevitable. Companies will either have to learn to use less software or charge their clients more thereby increasing inflation. I

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Hebrewhammer8d8@reddit

You either pay for the product/software or you put the work in to develop, maintain, and troubleshoot yourself.

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Fritzo2162@reddit

Quickbooks is doing this too. “No more desktop versions….here’s your $1200 bill to use our software every year instead of $300 every 3 years.”

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Steve----O@reddit

The global inflation from the US and EU printing too much money will hit different areas at different times. Software companies can adjust faster. Where I work, we have 4 year contracts with customers. so we can't raise our prices or our wages for a couple more years.

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GhostInThePudding@reddit

Some of it is price gouging. But also actual inflation over the last 5 years has been massively under reported in the CPI. Actual inflation over the last 5 years in the USA, EU, UK and some other places is around 100% total.

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No_Investigator3369@reddit

Is it gouging though really when you build the backbone of your product on something so easily rug pulled that is not yours?

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AutoRotate0GS@reddit

Since covid and 'inflation', we're in a new era of price strategy. People can charge anything for anything....and people will pay anything. Taxes can be raised indiscriminately for anything. It's a new perpetual cycle. What are your options really...besides just pay?

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No_Investigator3369@reddit

Broadcom made everyone realize you can claim you're gonna take the prosumer way all you want. But if you want to be in the SP500, FAFO'ing will lead to finding out. I like watching it.

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BadSausageFactory@reddit

turns out perpetual licenses don't generate perpetual income

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Flabbergasted98@reddit

Same thing thats happening everywhere else. Late stage capitalism. Techbro's are buying out companies, then jacking up the prices for stock increases and short term gains. IF you're not canibalizing smaller companies, you're not in the game.

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frankv1971@reddit (OP)

I recognize this from the past with Solarwinds buying tool after tool (and then increase the prices dramatically)

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