The Invoice ■ Episode 11
“Pay only for what you use! Always up to date! No maintenance!”
Splendid. Let us examine what you are actually paying for.
In 2012, you could buy Adobe Creative Suite 6 Master Collection for $2,599. You owned it. It ran offline. It asked nothing of you beyond the occasional restart. In 2015, Adobe stopped selling it. The only option now: $55 per month, $660 per year, forever. After four years you have paid more than the perpetual licence. After ten years: $6,600. You own nothing.
You were not upgraded. You were expropriated.
The Ownership Invoice
You used to buy software. A box, a disc, a licence key. It was yours. It worked on Tuesday and it worked on Wednesday and it would continue working on Thursday regardless of whether the vendor’s billing server was having a particularly trying afternoon.
Now you rent access. Stop paying, lose everything: the tool, the workflow, the files in formats only that tool reads. Your files are yours, technically. Opening them without a subscription is your problem. The format is the lock. The subscription is the key. And the key has a monthly fee.
Most SaaS platforms now grant themselves the right to train on your hosted content. You create it. You pay for it. They train on it. Rather generous of them.
The Accumulation Invoice
The average company runs 220 SaaS applications. Average spend: $4,830 per employee per year, up 22 per cent from 2024. One developer: Jira, Slack, GitHub Enterprise, Copilot, Figma, Datadog. Minimum $1,395 per year. Before CI/CD, error tracking, or security scanning.
75 per cent of IT teams have no visibility into what SaaS their organisation actually uses. Marvellous governance, that.
Each subscription is modest in isolation. $8 here. $19 there. The genius of the model is that nobody totals them. They accumulate like sediment, invisible until the riverbed has risen high enough to flood the building.
The Hostage Invoice
Your data sits on their servers. In their format. Behind their API. The exit door exists. It is clearly marked. The corridor behind it is three miles long, unlit, and paved with proprietary export formats.
When Broadcom acquired VMware, prices increased 800 to 1,500 per cent. Bundles consolidated from 168 to 4. Existing customers received a choice between the new pricing and the door. Most chose the pricing, because the cost of migration exceeded the cost of extortion. That is not a coincidence. That is the business model.
HashiCorp switched Terraform to BSL. The community forked it within days. Redis did the same. Unity tried a per-install fee. The pattern is remarkably consistent: build community on open terms, accumulate dependence, then change the terms.
You can leave. Your data, workflows, and muscle memory would rather stay, if you do not mind.
The Margin Invoice
SaaS gross margins run between 75 and 90 per cent. The model is not about value to you. It is about predictable revenue for them. Wall Street rewards recurring revenue. Recurring revenue requires subscriptions. Subscriptions require that you cannot leave. The incentive structure is exquisitely misaligned with your interests.
37signals left AWS, saved $2 million in year one. They now sell ONCE: software you buy, download, and own. David Heinemeier Hansson, who co-created Ruby on Rails and pioneered SaaS in the 2000s: “We pioneered SaaS. Now we are leading the way out.”
When the person who helped build the model tells you the model is broken, the polite thing to do is listen.
The Distinction
None of this means the subscription model is inherently broken. A piece of software that requires real infrastructure, servers, storage, bandwidth, continuous security patching, has running costs. Somebody must pay them. A monthly fee is a perfectly honest way to do that, provided the terms are honest too.
The problem is not the recurring payment. The problem is what the industry has quietly bundled underneath it: silent price increases, proprietary formats that hold your data hostage, export features that exist on paper but produce unusable output, and licence terms that treat your content as training data for models you never consented to.
A fair subscription has three properties. First, the price reflects genuine operating cost plus a reasonable margin, not the maximum the market will tolerate before customers notice. Second, you own your data in a format that another tool can actually read, not a proprietary dialect with just enough compliance to satisfy a press release. Third, if you stop paying, you lose the service, not access to everything you created whilst using it.
Subscription software that meets those three criteria is not merely acceptable it can be genuinely good. Hosted infrastructure you do not have to maintain, automatic security updates, collaboration that works across time zones: these are real advantages, not marketing copy. The tragedy is not that SaaS exists. It is that the industry discovered it could get away with charging rent on your own output, and most of us barely noticed.
The Alternative
Affinity Suite (Photo, Designer, Publisher) costs $165. Once. The entire Adobe workflow for two months of Creative Cloud. No subscription. No cloud dependency. No AI training on your work.
LibreOffice. Nextcloud. GitLab CE. Mattermost. Penpot. Grafana. Prometheus. Free. Self-hosted. Yours. The software exists. The ecosystem exists. What is missing is not capability. What is missing is the institutional courage to install it.
The EU Data Act introduces switching rights from September 2025, with switching fees banned from January 2027. Europe, it appears, has noticed the pattern. Whether the legislation will survive the lobbying is another matter entirely.
The Invoice
You bought software. Then you rented it. Then you rented it at a higher price. Then the terms changed. Then you could not leave.
At no point did anyone ask whether you preferred this arrangement.
The subscription model solved one problem: unpredictable vendor revenue. It created another: silent, compounding expropriation of tools you used to own.
The invoice is not the monthly fee. It is the permanent loss of ownership.