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.
No, and if it were, it would deserve the dismissal.
Prices rise. What part A describes is a set of mechanisms by which the decision moves: plans retired so the price is not a comparison, minimums changed so a threshold that is nothing at scale is severe below it, tiers thinned at the same cost, upgrades arriving on the vendor’s schedule and destroying local adaptations.
The test of whether this is complaint or analysis is the last section. Money you can budget for. What is described here is the loss of the ability to decline, and that is a different kind of thing.
They do, and the evidence record says so before it says anything else, in the same words.
That is why the piece leans hardest on the tier that is not disputable — vendors announcing their own changes. Microsoft’s own July 2026 pricing, Broadcom’s own catalogue consolidation, Atlassian’s own Data Center increases, Adobe’s own restructure. Those are not estimates by an interested party.
The consultancy percentages are used for shape rather than magnitude, and where a figure appeared in only one weak source we describe the mechanism and omit the number.
Partly, and the piece says so twice — in the text and in the limits.
We found no New Zealand data on small-organisation software costs or renewal experience, and nothing on how New Zealand public bodies responded to these specific changes. We have not inferred either from the international figures.
What is New Zealand–specific is elsewhere in the series: the procurement evidence behind Test 0 in The Sovereignty Assessment Instrument is domestic and first-hand on the instrument side.
If you have New Zealand data, it would improve this part more than anything else we could do to it.
It is refusing an argument that would fail.
If the case rests on bad faith, it can be answered by demonstrating good faith, and the vendors would win because there is nothing to find. Every action described is an ordinary commercial decision by a firm with pricing power and a duty to shareholders.
Refusing the moral frame makes the argument harder to dismiss, not softer. A structural problem does not go away when everyone involved behaves reasonably — that is what makes it structural.
Some do, and they are large enough that their departure would be noticed.
The piece is addressed to organisations that are not. A four-person practice has no leverage, no procurement function, and no ability to make a supplier care. That asymmetry is the subject, and “negotiate better” is advice that works for the people who do not need it.
Neither is excluded and both appear elsewhere in this series.
The reasoning in part A is narrower: every remedy available to a single organisation leaves the imbalance intact. Switching vendors resets a clock. Running it yourself needs skills and continuity most small organisations lack. Regulation may help and does not arrive at the speed of your next renewal.
What changes the shape is scale — forty organisations together can do what one cannot. Whether the vehicle should be a co-operative rather than something else is argued in The blueprint and it is a fair thing to contest.
Some do. The piece cites the New Zealand precedent because the form is well understood here and the law exists, not because success is assured.
The position is set out in The blueprint: four documented failure modes, one of which is that member capital is slow and another that field service destroys organisations that did not plan to be in it. None is mysterious and all are survivable if named in advance.
Not on its own, and the piece does not say it is. Repricing predates it.
What AI adds is the subject of the rest of the series: the bundled capability is also capability arriving inside software nobody evaluated as AI, from a supplier the buyer cannot name, under terms never shown. That is a governance problem on top of a pricing one, and it is why part A ends by pointing at Test 0 rather than at a solution.
Evidence that the pattern is reversing — that legacy plans are being retained rather than sunset, that thresholds are moving down rather than up, or that small organisations are finding switching cheaper than it was.
More usefully: New Zealand data showing small organisations here are not experiencing what the international figures describe. We would publish that.
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 · glossary · sources and provenance