Death by a thousand subscriptions.

A small monthly number. A large annual habit.

Nobody signs up for an €8,000-a-year software bill. You sign up for mail at €12 a seat, then a CRM, then a ticket tool, then a password manager, then backups, then something to glue it all together. Each one is a sensible decision on the day. Nobody adds them up.

Yet for a ten-person team the total is about €700 a month: about €8,400 a year, or about €70 per person every month, for tools that mostly store text and move it around. That is rent. It comes back every month, it rises at renewal, and at the end of the year you own nothing.

Here is what that looks like for a ten-person team on commonly chosen business plans:

US list prices on 21 September 2026, converted at the ECB rate of 17 September 2026 (€0.871 per dollar) and rounded, before tax. European list prices vary a little by country. The entry tiers are cheaper on paper, but most teams outgrow them within months.

Prices do not sit still, and they only move one way. When did you last see a subscription get cheaper at renewal? Take Microsoft, because almost everyone pays them. Each price step looks small: a dollar here, a dollar and a half there. Across the whole customer base they add up. In the quarter ending March 2026, Microsoft grew its consumer 365 subscribers by 7% and the revenue from them by 33%. The gap between those two numbers is not new customers, and it is not new features. It is the same people paying more for the same product. Every vendor on the list above does the same, because raising the price for existing customers is the easiest way to grow revenue.

Total your own stack: files, documents, passwords, customer records, automation and backups. How much capacity could you own with a few years of those payments?

A fee on every step.

Automation is meant to make repetitive work cheap. On automation platforms such as Zapier and Make, usage pricing can turn each little step into a billable event. Reading data, adding a row, sending a message: every action counts against an allowance.

Every platform has its own units, bundles and AI extras; it is the same everywhere. What bothers us is the incentive: a useful automation becomes more expensive precisely because you use it.

On your own server, another local step uses the capacity you already bought. Running a self-hosted workflow, such as n8n, can avoid a platform’s per-action meter. The electricity per step is negligible next to a per-action fee, and any paid APIs the workflow calls stay paid. What disappears is the platform’s cut on every step.

Buy capacity. Use it.

Hardware progress gives you more work from a machine. Per-seat and per-action pricing can keep billing as if every extra use needs another little machine of its own.

We think everyday business software belongs on infrastructure you can own. A capable local server, useful open-source apps and a good setup should be the starting point. Use cloud services for the jobs that justify them.

One line stays on the bill: email. Nearly every team already has a mailbox that works, and mail sent from an office connection is often filtered or blocked by the large providers. We do not suggest self-hosting it. Documents, files, customer records, passwords, automation and backups are where the ownership case is strongest.

OurGrove’s planned business is hardware, parts and optional services around a free OS. We want to earn money helping you own the setup. Running another app should make your Grove more useful.

Which subscription did we forget? Tell us about your stack ↗