Rent or Own — The Five-Year Math With Both Sides Priced Properly
A ten-tool subscription stack is $11,188 over five years against $455 to own. That gap is real and it is also incomplete, because nobody prices the owning side honestly. Here is the full calculation, including where renting wins.
Here is the number that makes the case for owning software, computed from our own price ledger:
A named ten-tool stack for a small business — entry tiers and published minimums only — is $186.47 a month. Over five years that is $11,188.20. The equivalent self-hosted licences are $455, paid once. A gap of $10,733.20.
That number is real, it is cited, and on its own it is not a good enough reason to change anything. Because the $455 side of it is not what owning actually costs, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
This page prices both sides properly. We sell the software on the right-hand side of that comparison, which is exactly why the honest version has to come from us rather than about us.
What the rent side actually is
From the ledger of 82 vendors, verified and dated:
- The ten-tool stack at entry tiers: $186.47/month. Built only from published entry prices and published minimums — no enterprise tiers, no tools a genuinely small business would never run.
- A cross-check using the whole ledger's median priced figure — $39.00/month per tool — gives $23,400 over five years for ten tools. The lower figure is the conservative one and it is the one we use.
- 26% of priced vendors (15 of 57) charge per seat, so the rent side is not fixed. It rises when you hire.
- 31% of figures (26 of 83) have no usable published price at all. You cannot forecast a five-year cost for a third of this market, because a third of it will not tell you today's.
Note the direction of every one of those adjustments: the rent side of the comparison is the side with unpriced upside risk.
What the own side actually is, with nothing left out
The licence is the smallest line. Here is the rest of it.
1. Hosting
Ordinary shared hosting runs these applications — PHP 8, MySQL or SQLite, no Docker, no Node. For a concrete number from a named provider: Hetzner's own pricing — machine-read from the price API behind their pricing pages on 10 Aug 2026 — lists web-hosting plans from €1.60 to €16.72 a month and entry cloud servers from €3.99 a month (prices as returned for their German datacenters; confirm current pricing and VAT treatment at checkout). Any comparable host works — the point is that the "own" side of this comparison costs single-digit euros a month.
The honest structural point does not depend on the figure: one server hosts all of them. The ten-tool stack does not need ten servers. This is the only line on the own side that does not scale with the number of tools, and it is the reason owning gets cheaper per tool the more you own.
2. Setup time
Budget an hour per application — upload, database, configure, import your data. Ten tools is a working day, and it is a working day you spend before anything works.
Price it at your own cost of an hour, not at zero. A ten-tool migration priced at a modest internal rate is a real four-figure number in year one, and it is the single most commonly omitted line in every rent-vs-own comparison including, historically, ours.
3. Maintenance
PHP point releases, occasional dependency updates, and a backup you actually test. Realistically an hour a month across a small stack, most months near zero and occasionally a bad afternoon.
And there is a failure mode with no subscription equivalent: nobody is coming to fix it. A hosted vendor's outage is somebody's emergency at 3am. Yours is yours.
4. The risk you are accepting
A one-time licence buys the software as it is today. If the publisher stops updating it, you keep a working copy — which is genuinely better than a cancelled SaaS account, where you keep nothing — but you keep an ageing one.
Weigh that honestly in both directions: a self-hosted app you own cannot be discontinued out from under you, cannot be repriced, and cannot move your data. It can, however, quietly stop being the best tool for the job while you are not looking.
The formula
Five-year cost of renting:
(monthly price × 60) + (per-seat price × new hires × months they are employed) + any tier you will cross
Five-year cost of owning:
licences + (hosting × 60) + (setup hours × your hourly cost) + (maintenance hours × 60 months × your hourly cost) + migration back out if you are wrong
Run both. If the gap is under about a thousand dollars, rent — because the difference is smaller than the value of not thinking about it. If the gap is five figures, as it is for the ten-tool stack above, the arithmetic survives every honest adjustment on the owning side and it is worth a day of your time.
Where renting wins, and these are not edge cases
1. Anything that moves money. If the tool collects payments, runs direct debits, chases failed cards or touches payroll, the compliance and reliability burden is worth paying for. We say this in our own gym and café guides, against our own products: if billing is the core problem, buy the platform.
2. Anything where the vendor carries liability you would otherwise carry. Certain compliance and safety products are priced partly as insurance. Self-hosting moves that exposure onto you, and a saved subscription is a bad trade against a regulatory finding.
3. Anything with a free tier that genuinely fits. A solo operator or a very small team can often get to zero recurring cost on free and open-source tools — Cal.com, Kimai, Invoice Ninja, Wave's free tier — and in that case owning a paid licence is a worse deal than renting. We have written that out in full and named the free tools, because it is true.
4. Anything you have not used yet. A subscription is a cheap way to find out whether you actually want a tool. A licence is a cheap way to keep one you already know you want. Trial on the subscription. Own the survivors.
The break-even, stated plainly
A one-time licence pays for itself against a subscription in:
licence price ÷ monthly subscription price = months to break even
Worked from real ledger figures: a $34 licence — Invora, our invoicing app — against FreshBooks Lite at $23.00/month breaks even in about six weeks. A $59 licence against a $30/month minimum breaks even in two months. Even after loading the owning side with hosting and an hour of setup, those two examples break even inside a year.
But run it on your own line. A $199 licence against a $9/month tool takes nearly two years, and over that horizon "will I still be using this?" is a real question rather than a rhetorical one.
What most comparisons get wrong
They compare a licence to a subscription. That is the wrong comparison. The right one is a total cost of ownership to a total cost of rental, and the ownership side has four lines, three of which are your time.
The reason the gap survives anyway, for a multi-tool stack, is not that owning is cheap. It is that renting compounds and owning does not. Sixty months is sixty payments; a licence is one payment and a server you were probably going to have.
And the reason to be suspicious of anyone quoting only the headline gap — including us, when we quote it without this page attached — is that the headline is computed with the owning side at zero effort. It is never zero.
Next steps
- The 2026 SaaS Rent Index — where the $11,188 figure comes from, with every vendor named and dated
- What a freelancer pays for software every year — the case where free tools beat both renting and owning
- The SaaS Price Observatory — 82 vendors, quoted from their own pages, with the verification date on every row
- Your backup is not a backup until you have restored it — the maintenance line, in practice
Subscription figures are quoted from each vendor's own pricing page with the date read. The ledger is a point-in-time snapshot and contains no historical prices, so no figure on this page describes a price change over time.