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.

The raw material for all of it is public: the Price Observatory holds every verified vendor figure this store tracks, and the calculator runs this article's math on your own toolset, live. Selected apps can also be hosted for you on Ownware Cloud — the honest trade-off guide covers when that's worth it.