Drafted with AI assistance, then checked and revised by the author. The judgements and the errors are the author’s. How this site is written sets out what is declared on every piece, who checks it, and where the per-piece record lives.
The vocabulary of a renewal conversation, and what each term costs you.
Sunsetting a plan. Withdrawing the tier you are on so that the nearest available option costs more. You are not offered a higher price for the same thing — the same thing stops existing. Currently the largest single driver of increases.
What it costs you: the ability to compare. There is nothing to compare against.
Shrinkflation. The tier keeps its price and loses value — reduced support, tightened service levels, fewer features. Reported in roughly a quarter of late-2025 renewals.
What it costs you: it does not appear in any budget line, because nothing went up.
Bundling. Combining capabilities so that a feature you do not want arrives attached to one you cannot drop. The current justification is usually AI.
Minimum licence change. Raising the smallest quantity you may buy. The clearest example is a vSphere Standard minimum moving from sixteen cores to seventy-two.
What it costs you: everything, if you are small. A threshold change is neutral at scale and severe below it, which is why these transitions feel targeted when nothing was aimed at anyone.
Migration-related increase. A charge at renewal for an architectural change the vendor made and you did not request.
Discount withdrawal. Removing volume or agreement discounts without altering list prices. The effective rise can be substantial while the published price is unchanged.
Perpetual licence. You bought it and it keeps working. Increasingly withdrawn.
Subscription. You rent it and it stops when you stop paying — and it accumulates your work inside it while you do.
What it costs you: the accumulation is the point. Every month raises the cost of leaving.
Forced subscription migration. Converting perpetual holders to subscription with no option to stay. The VMware transition is the template others are reported to be watching.
Seat inflation. Costs rising because the count of chargeable users grows, without any change to the product or the price per seat.
Switching cost. Everything that would have to be rebuilt: records, workflows, integrations, the way people work, years of history. It is not a fee and it is not on any invoice.
What it costs you: it is the whole subject. It rises quietly and it is what makes the next increase easier to impose.
Customisation. A local adaptation that makes standard software fit your work. Destroyed by upgrades arriving on the vendor’s schedule.
What it costs you: more than the rebuilding weeks. The person who understood the adaptation has now watched it destroyed twice and has stopped making them.
Institutional knowledge. What your organisation knows about how it works, much of which lives inside the tools rather than in anyone’s head. Not portable, rarely documented, and lost quietly at each forced transition.
Refusal. Declining a change and continuing to function. The subject of Test 5 in The Sovereignty Assessment Instrument, and the thing part A argues is lost.
Worth knowing because: a price you can refuse is a negotiation. A price you cannot refuse is something else.
Captive customer. One for whom leaving costs more than accepting. Not a description of anyone’s intent — a description of a position.
Structural. A problem that persists even when every participant behaves reasonably. Used precisely in this series and not as a softener.
Vendor lock-in. Usually framed as a tactic. In this series it is treated as an accumulating property, because that framing survives the observation that nobody planned it.
The squeeze. Shorthand for the whole pattern — repricing, retirement, bundling, threshold changes and forced upgrades — combined with an inability to decline any of it. Deliberately informal, because the technical framings all name one mechanism and miss the rest.
What this publication does not claim, and what is outstanding against it in the register.
A question this rests on is parked: What do we do with an application that refuses to run inside the boundary?
We do not claim that a member's existing applications can be made to run inside the boundary. We claim only that the boundary reveals which ones cannot.
Alongside: the publication · questions and answers · sources and provenance