They aren't two prices, they're two deals
Paying for software once and paying a monthly fee aren't two price tags on the same object, they're two different agreements, and the real difference is who keeps the risk when something goes wrong after delivery
With a one-off payment you buy the development, you have it delivered, and from that moment the program is yours, the good of it and the bad of it. With a monthly fee you buy nothing, you pay for the use, and as long as you pay, the work of keeping it standing stays with whoever built it
Paying once, what it's really like
The virtue of paying once is that it ends. You put down the figure and the matter is closed, and in the years that follow that program doesn't hand you a bill every month, so if you use it for a long time and nothing breaks it's the road that costs less
The price of that virtue is that the whole cost lands at the start, before you've seen whether the work does what you hoped, so you're paying for the risk up front as well, and from then on the risk is yours
Then there's the part almost nobody counts when comparing the two roads. An automation that drives the business software you use lives attached to screens you didn't design, and the day that supplier moves a field or changes the way a printout comes out, the automation seizes up
At that point you start negotiating again, you ask for a quote, you wait your turn, and meanwhile the work goes back to being done by hand, which is covered at length in the guide on what happens when your business software changes
The monthly fee, what it's really like
The monthly fee turns the same things the other way round. You don't put down a large sum at the start, you begin paying while the thing works, and maintenance isn't an event to negotiate each time, it's inside the price
Muffin Suite works this way. The fee is agreed before the work starts and it covers development, use, support, fixes and maintenance, while the term and the conditions are written into the contract for each project, and the Subscription page goes through it in full
The drawback is plain. With a fee you pay for as long as you use it, and if you keep something running for many years the sum of the months goes past what you'd have spent once, because the account never closes while the service is alive
When paying once is the better deal
Paying once really is the better deal, and we say so even though we don't sell it, when the automation looks like this
- it's small, it does one thing and always does it the same way
- it works on files and folders you control, not on somebody else's programs that change whenever they like
- the rules inside it stand still, they don't depend on regulations or price lists that move
- you have somebody in house who can get their hands on it the day it's needed
A script that takes files from a folder every night and turns them into a summary, say, needs no fee at all, you pay for it once and that's the end of it, and if somebody offers it to you on subscription you're paying for air
When the fee is the better deal
A monthly fee makes sense when the automation touches things that move on their own, the business software you use, a portal with its own login and its own pages, supplier documents that change template without telling you, because with all that the work doesn't end at delivery, it starts there
The second reason is more down to earth. A fee keeps whoever did the work interested in it working, because somebody who gets paid every month has something to lose the day the system stops, while with a one-off delivery the interest of whoever wrote it ends when the money clears
A quick sum, with made-up numbers
Here's an example with invented figures, there to show the reasoning, they aren't prices and they aren't anybody's real case
Say a one-off delivery at a hundred, with two changes a year at ten each because the business software keeps moving. After three years you're at a hundred and sixty, and every time you waited for a quote
Say a fee of five a month. After three years you're at a hundred and eighty, so you've spent more, but you put nothing down and you negotiated no repairs, and the real sum you do with your own number of years and with how often that program actually changes
How to choose
The right question isn't which arrangement costs less, it's how still the thing you want to automate really is
If it stands still, just buy it, because a fee on work that doesn't move is an income stream you're funding for nothing. If it does move, look at who pays when it breaks, because the break comes