Refactoring Orgs

I buy software for our company. Last week, the renewal offer for a tracking tool we started with at 60K landed at 160K for next year. Yes, we use more. We track more. Almost three times the price for a tracking tool was never on my mental map.

I used to estimate vendor cost on a ten-year horizon. In my mind that 160K turns into 1.6 million for one tool. That math used to be useful. It isn't anymore, because the SaaS playbook was designed to make it useless. You start small. The vendor widens the surface area. A small replay feature gets bundled into a suite that has no standalone price, just an extra 15% on whatever you currently pay. Contracts without 3 to 8 percent automatic uplifts are getting rare. That is before overusage. Before expansion. The unpredictability is the product.

What changed is the alternative. Self-hosting an open source equivalent, or building a small purpose-built tool, used to need a team I couldn't justify. Now it needs a weekend and a focused prompt. The vendor's pricing model assumes leaving is hard. That assumption just expired.

So when I look at 160K, I am not looking at next year's tracking bill. I am looking at the last year of the old contract logic. Either that number comes back to something forecastable, or 1.6 million stops being a line item and turns into a build decision.