What per-seat software actually costs a mid-size company

Ask a company what its CRM costs and you will be given the licence line. It is the number on the invoice, so it is the number people quote. In practice it is rarely more than half of what the platform actually costs, and the half that is easiest to reduce.

The five lines

A fair total has five components, and only the first appears on the invoice.

• Licences: seats times price times twelve. Simple, visible, and the one everyone negotiates.
• Unused seats: the licences assigned to people who log in monthly, or not at all. In every audit we have run, this is a meaningful share — and it is invisible precisely because it costs nothing to leave a seat assigned.
• Administration: the internal time spent configuring, maintaining and explaining the platform, plus whatever is paid to a partner for changes the team cannot make itself.
• Integration: connectors, middleware licences and the engineering time to keep data flowing between the platform and everything else. This line often rivals the licence line and is almost never counted against it.
• Constraint: the cost of the processes you do not run because the platform will not support them, and the changes that take a quarter because they route through someone else's backlog. Hard to quantify, easy to recognise once named.

Do the arithmetic over five years, not one

An annual figure makes rent look small and a build look large. The comparison that matters is a rented cost that recurs against an owned cost that does not. At 40 seats and a mid-tier per-seat price, five years of licences alone typically lands in the low millions of CZK — before the other four lines. That is the number to hold a build quote against.

Two honest caveats. Per-seat list prices move, and vendor discounting at renewal is real — use your own current invoice, not a published list price. And a build has a maintenance cost too; it is much smaller than rent, but it is not zero, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

When renting is correct

Below roughly twenty seats on a standard plan, the arithmetic almost always favours renting, and no amount of dislike for the vendor changes that. The same is true when the process you are running is genuinely commodity — payroll rules, tax filing, email — where the vendor's compliance burden is the product you are buying.

The build case gets strong in the opposite conditions: many seats, a process that is specific to how your company competes, heavy integration with systems you already own, and a platform that has started to dictate the process rather than serve it.

The one question worth asking first

Not "what does it cost" but "what fraction of what we pay for do we use?" Every company has an intuition about the answer. Almost none has measured it, and the measurement usually surprises the person who was most confident.