Engineering Cost Intelligence Tools
Software Purchase Risk Calculator
Evaluates vendor lock-in, adoption risk, hidden costs, and contract flexibility to produce a risk-adjusted purchase score.
Calculations run locally in your browserTool
About this tool
Software Purchase Risk Calculator
The Software Purchase Risk Calculator scores SaaS purchase risk across lock-in, adoption, hidden costs, and contract flexibility dimensions.
• Score vendor lock-in risk before signing a multi-year contract
• Compare adoption risk across competing SaaS products
• Quantify hidden costs like onboarding, training, and integration
• Generate risk-adjusted purchase recommendations for procurement review
Affiliate disclosure
Uptime, incident, and on-call management. Better Stack provides status pages, incident management, and on-call scheduling for engineering teams.View external options →
FAQ
What does this tool tell you?
The Software Purchase Risk Calculator scores SaaS purchase risk across lock-in, adoption, hidden costs, and contract flexibility dimensions.
What affects the result most?
Risk score = complexity(30) + adoption(25) + integration(25) + vendor(20). Year 1 cost = subscription + internal labor (setup + ongoing admin). Red Flag threshold: risk score >= 75, or >= 60 with year-1 cost >= $50K.
How should I use the result?
The calculation is deterministic — the same inputs always produce the same output — so the most useful workflow is to vary one input at a time and see which factor moves the result most. That tells you where to focus your attention before committing to a decision.