Microsoft raised UK Microsoft 365 prices by up to a third in July 2026. QuickBooks Online Plus rose 47% in January. A rented system moves in one direction, and your seat count moves with your headcount. A second cost sits beside the subscription and rarely appears in a quotation. This article separates the two, and states what removes each one.
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Microsoft increased UK Microsoft 365 prices in July 2026, by up to a third on some plans. A UK managed service provider published a breakdown of the increase.
QuickBooks Online Plus rose 47% in January 2026. Two large suppliers, six months apart, and neither increase followed a change in what the customer received.
Neither rise was unusual. A subscription price is a decision the supplier makes each year, and the customer's position is to accept it or to migrate.
Three properties make the direction predictable.
We set out the five forms of lock-in, and the seven tests to apply before signature, in vendor lock-in, what can you prove before you sign.
The subscription is the visible cost. A second cost arrives whenever your organisation changes shape.
Consider a care provider that adds a new service line. The records system holds no record type for it, so the supplier quotes a change. A council that merges two teams needs a new permission structure, and that is another quotation. A charity that takes on a new funder needs a new reporting field, and that is a third.
Each change is a schema change in a traditional system. A new table, a migration, a test cycle and a release. The work is real, and the price reflects it.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology reports on how UK organisations hold and use data in the UK Business Data Survey 2026.
A foundation whose shape does not change when your requirements change.
engage.re holds everything in five database tables, and those five never change. A new record type adds an entry to a shared dictionary, so no table appears and no migration follows.
Three consequences follow for your costs.
The saving therefore grows with time, because a traditional system accumulates schema debt and this one does not.
We build your system on engage.re, and you own the result.
Sense Future built engage.re, and it has run in production since December 2025.
Four costs remain, and we state them because a comparison needs them.
The honest comparison is therefore not free against paid. It is a rising annual cost with a rising exit price, against a larger first-year cost with a stable shape.
A sector hub lets several organisations share the cost of a foundation while keeping their own data separate. Twelve care homes need the same record types, and each one needs its own estate.
Deterministic identifiers make this work. Every organisation on the shared dictionary means the same thing by a resident, so the shared part is the vocabulary and the separate part is the data.
HM Government's Technology Code of Practice pushes public bodies towards this position, through open standards and avoided lock-in.
A council pays per-seat licences across forty systems. A 10% rise across the estate arrives without a corresponding budget increase, and the council absorbs it by reducing something else. Its exit cost from any one system exceeds the annual saving from moving.
A small business pays for six subscriptions. Two suppliers raise prices in the same year, and the owner spends a weekend comparing alternatives before renewing both. The arithmetic is smaller and the position is identical.
The care home software and charity software pages set out the sector detail. Our guides to care home software costs and charity CRM costs give the current UK figures.
Because your position weakens each year. Your data sits inside the system, so your exit cost rises with every month of use. You pay per seat, so growth in headcount raises your bill. Your processes fit the product, so a move costs more than the licence difference. The supplier knows all three.
By up to a third on some plans, in July 2026. QuickBooks Online Plus rose 47% in January 2026. Neither increase followed a change in what the customer received.
Structural change. A new service line, a team merger or a new funder requirement each needs a new record type, permission structure or field. In a traditional system that is a schema change: a new table, a migration, a test cycle and a release. The supplier quotes for each one.
By holding a shape that does not change. engage.re holds everything in five database tables that never change, so a new record type adds an entry to a shared dictionary rather than a table. A new record type is configuration, a new permission structure is data, and a new field is a declaration.
Not in year one. The honest comparison is a rising annual cost with a rising exit price, against a larger first-year cost with a stable shape. Which one wins depends on your rate of change, and a system that changes shape often favours the second.
We build your system on engage.re, and you own the result. No per-seat charge for your own system, change as configuration rather than development, self-hosting under a published conformance package at version 2.0.0, definitions that travel with an export, and your own encryption keys.
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