Rent vs. own: the real 3-year math of business SaaS

Subscription software has one property no feature list mentions: it never finishes being paid for. A one-time tool costs what it costs; a subscription costs what it costs times every month you stay in business. This guide does that multiplication with real, source-linked numbers — the same verified figures our per-product comparison pages cite — over a three-year horizon.

How to read these numbers

• Every SaaS figure below is the vendor's own published list price, verified on 2026-07-05 on the linked pricing page, with the exact plan named. Prices change — always confirm on the source link before deciding anything.
• These are category comparisons, not feature-clone comparisons. Buildium does more than Rentara; Fiix does more than Fixora. The question is whether your use fits the smaller tool — if it does, the delta below is real money.
• Our prices are the current one-time prices in this store. Three-year SaaS totals are plan price × 36 months. This is arithmetic, not a quote.

Five comparisons, three years each

• Property management. Buildium's Essential plan starts at $62/month (source, checked 2026-07-05). Over three years that is $2,232. Rentara — units, leases, rent ledgers, deposits, owner statements — is $119 once. Break-even: month 2.
• Maintenance management (CMMS). Fiix's Basic plan is $45 per user, per month (source, checked 2026-07-05). A three-user maintenance team pays $135/month — $4,860 over three years. Fixora is $129 once, with no per-user pricing at all.
• Food-safety logs (HACCP). FoodDocs' Lite plan is $79 per site/month on annual billing — $948/year, exclusive of VAT (source, checked 2026-07-05). Three years: $2,844 per site. Safora is $44 once.
• Consignment shops. SimpleConsign's Basic plan is $159/month, billed monthly (source, checked 2026-07-05). Three years: $5,724. Consigna is $84 once.
• Inventory replenishment. Cogsy's all-in-one plan is $199/month (source, checked 2026-07-05). Three years: $7,164. Restock is $89 once.

No business runs all five, but the shape repeats in every category we have checked: the three-year SaaS total lands one to two orders of magnitude above the one-time price. Even the cheapest comparison here (Buildium at $62/month) pays for its self-hosted counterpart seventeen times over in three years.

What the math leaves out — on both sides

Honest accounting means listing what the subscription buys that a one-time purchase does not:

• Hosting is included in SaaS. Self-hosting means a server you already have, or roughly $5/month for a small VPS — about $180 over three years. Add it to our column; the gap barely moves.
• Their ops team is included. Backups, updates, and uptime are the vendor's job on SaaS and yours when you self-host. That is a genuine cost in attention, if not in dollars — we spell it out in the self-hosting walkthrough.
• Bigger feature sets. The SaaS platforms above are broader products. If you depend on a feature the self-hosted tool honestly lists as a limitation — every product page here has a "limitations" section — the comparison does not apply to you, and we would rather you know that before buying.
• Per-seat and per-location multipliers cut the other way. The figures above are entry tiers. SaaS pricing scales with your growth (Fiix per user, FoodDocs per site, Buildium by unit count); a one-time license does not.

The break-even way to think

Skip the three-year totals and ask one question: how many months of the subscription equal the one-time price? In the five categories above it is between one and three months. Everything after break-even is money that stays in your business — every month, for as long as you use the tool.

Two refinements worth knowing before you decide:

• Suites compress the price further. When one business needs several of these tools, the bundles price below the sum of their parts — the Property Suite, for example, packages Rentara ($119) and Consigna ($84) at $149 instead of $203, and the suite pages compute that saving live from the current single prices rather than quoting a stored number.
• The horizon is yours to pick. Three years is a conservative window for business software; run the same arithmetic over five and the totals above grow by two-thirds while the one-time column does not move.

Each product page here shows its break-even against its own cited competitors, with a calculator you can set to your real seat count and time horizon. Start with the category you are paying for right now, or read what self-hosting actually involves if the operational side is the part holding you back.