Your analytics contract is expiring. Look beyond the invoice.

Over the past year, I have noticed that renewal discussions with clients have changed. Not because so many contracts are suddenly expiring, but because the renewal proposals look different.

License costs are rising—not with just one vendor, but across the market. According to research by Zylo, 79 percent of IT leaders now face price increases at renewal. Vertice puts SaaS inflation in the first quarter of 2026 at over 13 percent, nearly two percentage points higher than a year earlier.

You feel it most when you receive a renewal proposal that looks markedly different from the last one.

So what do you do? You have a few options.

Simply renew

You can sign. It works, and continuity is assured. Sometimes that is simply the right choice.

Negotiate

You can negotiate. A renewal is not a foregone conclusion. There may be room to negotiate, especially if you have a partner who knows the vendor and can handle the discussion effectively. It does not always lead to an adjustment, but if you do not ask, the answer is always no.

Review the contract model

You can review the contract model. Most platforms offer several options, and the combination that worked two years ago may no longer be right today. We recently saved a large Dutch representative body more than 30 percent by migrating it from on-premises to the cloud. It was a logical step it had wanted to take for some time, with a welcome side effect on the invoice. That does not even include the hardware savings.

Switch platforms

Sometimes the conclusion is that another platform is a better fit. An independent BI tool selection lets you compare the options based on usage, functionality, costs, architecture, and management. Switching is not always easy, but with the right guidance, it does not have to be a leap into the unknown. We are currently going through exactly that process with several clients.

But there is another question that I find at least as interesting.

Does the platform still align with where you want to go?

Vendors continuously add functionality, which partly justifies changes in pricing. In our experience, however, many organizations use only a fraction of what is available. That means you are not only paying more, but also failing to make full use of what you already have. This is especially true of the AI capabilities added to almost every platform in recent years.

A renewal is therefore not just a time to look at the invoice. It is also a time to assess whether your analytics environment still fits your organization’s needs—not what was purchased two years ago, but what you actually want now.

Would you like an independent assessment of the renewal proposal and your current direction? A Second Opinion Data & Analytics gives you insight into what is sound, where the risks lie, and which alternatives are realistic.

Sometimes renewing makes sense. Sometimes optimization is enough. And sometimes switching is the wiser choice.

Would you like to discuss your upcoming renewal, or more broadly how your Data & Analytics platform aligns with your organization? Schedule a call with us.

Eric van Gils

Eric is Commercial Director at Bitmetric and has worked in IT for more than 20 years, most of that time in data and Business Intelligence.

During that time, he has seen one thing again and again: organizations are not looking for attractive dashboards; they want answers to questions that truly matter. Clearly defining those questions is often the hardest part.

His guiding principle: “If you don’t know what to ask, you’ll never get the right answer.” Eric helps clients discover what they really want to know and ensures that Bitmetric delivers the solutions that make this possible.