If your software renewal landed with a higher number this year, you are not imagining a trend. 2026 has been a year of quiet, across-the-board price rises from the biggest names, and a new habit of charging separately for AI features on top of the subscription you already pay. None of this is a scandal. It is simply how the subscription model is designed to behave. The useful question is not whether to be annoyed, but when the maths tips towards owning software instead of renting it forever.
- Major vendors raised prices in 2026, and AI features are increasingly billed as usage on top of the base subscription.
- Subscription costs move in one direction because the model rewards raising prices on customers who are already locked in.
- The number that matters is not the monthly seat price. It is the total over three to five years, including every rise and every seat you add.
- Building your own pays off when a tool is central to how you work, priced per seat across a large team, and stable enough to keep for years.
- For everything else, staying on the subscription is the right call. This is a maths question, not a matter of principle.
What actually changed in 2026
The headline example is Microsoft. In its 2026 packaging update, new commercial pricing took effect from 1 July 2026, with Microsoft 365 Business Basic rising from 6 to 7 US dollars per user per month and Business Standard rising from 12.50 to 14 dollars, while existing customers move to the new price at their first renewal after that date. The figures are on Microsoft's own licensing pages. Microsoft is not alone: Salesforce raised list prices across its main editions, and tools like Slack have crept up in parallel. The direction is the same everywhere.
On top of the rises comes a structural shift. AI is now a billing event, not just a feature. Vendors are bundling AI into higher tiers or charging by credits, tokens, and actions, which turns a predictable monthly cost into a variable one you cannot fully forecast. According to Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index, 78 per cent of IT leaders reported unexpected charges tied to consumption or AI pricing, and 61 per cent of organisations had to cut projects in the past year because of unplanned SaaS cost rises. When your software bill becomes unpredictable, everything downstream of it becomes harder to plan.
Why subscription costs only go one way
It helps to understand why this keeps happening, because the pattern is not going to reverse. Subscription pricing is built around a simple asymmetry: winning a new customer is expensive, but raising the price on one who is already embedded is nearly free. Once your team has its data, its logins, and its daily habits inside a tool, moving off it is painful, and the vendor knows it. A modest annual rise, an AI add-on here, a plan that quietly loses a feature there, and the account grows in value without a single new customer. The renewal that only goes up is not a glitch. It is the business model working as intended.
Per-seat pricing sharpens the effect. The subscription that felt trivial for five people becomes a serious line item at fifty, and it keeps scaling with your headcount whether or not each new person uses the tool heavily. You are effectively taxed for growing.
Renting software is the right choice far more often than not. But rent has a habit of rising, and the landlord holds your keys. Past a certain size, owning starts to look sensible.
The number that matters is the three-year total
The mistake that keeps businesses on rising subscriptions is comparing the wrong numbers. A monthly seat price looks small next to the cost of building anything, so the comparison never gets made. But the honest comparison is not one month of subscription against a build. It is the full subscription cost over three to five years, including every price rise, every AI add-on, and every seat you will add as you grow, set against a one-time build that you then own.
Custom software is a larger cost upfront and a much smaller one after that: hosting and occasional changes, not a per-head fee that ratchets every renewal. Somewhere along that timeline the two lines cross, and after the crossover the owned tool is simply cheaper every month it runs. We walk through exactly how build costs are made up, and why the three-year total beats the sticker price, in our guide to what custom software actually costs.
When building your own actually pays off
Owning is not automatically better, and we will be the first to tell you when it is not. It tends to pay off when several of these are true at once. The tool is central to how you work, not a peripheral convenience, so it is worth investing in. It is priced per seat across a team large enough that the monthly total has become a real number. Your process does not fit the off-the-shelf product well, so you are paying for features you do not use while working around the ones you need. And the work is stable enough that a tool built for it will still fit in three years. When that profile matches, a custom build stops being an indulgence and becomes the cheaper, calmer option. We covered the full test in custom software versus off-the-shelf, and it is the honest framework, not a sales pitch for building.
When it does not, and you should stay on the subscription
For most tools, most of the time, the subscription is the right answer, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Commodity software that everyone uses the same way, email, calendars, video calls, accounting, is built better and cheaper by a vendor spreading the cost across millions of users than anything you would commission. If a tool is not central, not expensive at your scale, or changes shape often, keep renting it. Building your own version of something a subscription already does well is how you turn a small monthly cost into a large one-time mistake. The point is not to escape all subscriptions. It is to spot the one or two that have quietly grown into something worth owning.
What to do at your next renewal
You do not need to overhaul anything this quarter. When the next renewal quote arrives, do three things. Read what actually changed, because rises are often bundled with plan repackaging and new usage charges that are easy to miss. Add up the real annual cost across every seat, not the per-user figure, and project it three years out at the trend you are seeing. Then, for the one or two tools where that number has become genuinely large and the tool is central to your operation, it is worth asking whether owning would cost less over that horizon. That is a short conversation, not a project.
This is the kind of question our custom software work exists to answer honestly, and often the answer is to keep renting and change nothing. When a build does win, it can even become an asset in its own right: one marketing client of ours turned a tool we built into a product they now resell, which is the opposite of a cost that only rises. The FAQ covers the timing and cost questions people usually ask next.
Leo Tech Labs is a consulting-led software firm. We run the maths on build versus rent honestly, and tell you to stay on the subscription whenever that is the cheaper answer.