With your standard ERP software, after you buy the software, it's yours. Any company that uses an ERP system is pretty much forced to upgrade regularly to keep

With your standard ERP software, after you buy the software, it's yours. Any company that uses an ERP system is pretty much forced to upgrade regularly to keep in compliance. And every ERP system I've ever used or evaluated charged by the user. When we used Great Plains, sure it was ours. But the price was based on the license count. Then after 1-3 years support would end and we'd have to upgrade. Oh, we could have decided not to upgrade. But then our owner's auditors would come along and give us bad grades for using an unsupported system. We'd be out of compliance with our lenders. And we just sell stuff, we don't have to worry about HIPAA or ISO standards or any other compliance issues that some companies deal with. So we subscribed to the support plan, paid yearly and were entitled to all upgrades as they came out + some limited support from MS (which we never used). Now we are on NetSuite and we pay annually, just like we did before. Except now upgrades are handled for us and I don't have to purchase a new server every 3-5 years.