The five-year number
Subscriptions are compared monthly and lived with for years. The monthly figure is usually the smaller part of the total.
Comparing a hundred a month against a hundred and forty a month is comparing the visible fraction of two different totals. The rest is implementation, migration, internal time, training, integration and the cost of leaving.
A five-year total is not hard to build and it frequently reverses the ranking. Cost questions around productivity and efficiency are easier to expose when a real offer is used as the test case; the web page is one such example to examine alongside the contract and operating cost.
What goes into it
- Licence or subscription across five years, with expected increases rather than today's price held flat.
- Implementation: configuration, setup, any professional services.
- Migration: extracting, cleaning and loading your data. Usually underestimated by a wide margin.
- Internal time: the hours your own people spend on all of the above, at their real cost.
- Training, initial and for every new starter afterwards.
- Integration build and, importantly, its maintenance when either end changes.
- Ongoing administration: the fraction of somebody's job that becomes running this system.
- Exit cost at the end, whether you leave or renew.
It appears on no invoice, so it is excluded from most comparisons. It is frequently the largest single line, and it lands on people who already have jobs.
Assume the price rises
Modelling five years at today's price is modelling a scenario that will not happen. Software prices rise, tiers get restructured, and features move upward between tiers.
Model a realistic annual increase, and where the contract does not cap it, model a higher one. Where a vendor will commit to a cap in writing, that commitment has a value that should be weighed against a lower headline price with no cap.
Cheap products can carry expensive implementations
The relationship between licence cost and total cost is weak. A low-priced product needing heavy configuration, with thin documentation and slow support, can cost several times a more expensive one that works out of the box.
The signals are visible during evaluation: long implementation timelines in case studies, a partner network that exists to do setup, documentation that assumes a specialist, references who describe a long ramp.
Count the cost of the transition period
During changeover, output falls. People are learning, both systems may run in parallel, mistakes are more frequent, and somebody is managing the migration instead of their usual work.
This is a genuine cost of the decision and it belongs in the total. It also argues for timing: a changeover during your busiest quarter costs materially more than the same changeover in a quiet one.
Compare against doing nothing
Put the improved status quo in the same table, with its own five-year cost. It is the only comparison that answers whether the project is worth doing at all, as distinct from which product is best.
For the security obligations that can create implementation and operating cost, FTC data security guidance provides public business guidance.