· Software
Bench Accounting Shut Down With No Warning. VMware Customers Got Hit With a 1,500 Percent Price Increase. Both Started as a Rental.
The subscription math everyone runs compares this year's price to next year's. It almost never asks what happens when the company on the other end of the contract gets sold.
Two cases that show the actual risk
On December 27, 2024, Bench Accounting shut its platform down with almost no warning, locking customers out right as tax season was starting. The two figures for how many people that hit do not agree: an archived Bench page claimed more than 35,000 small business customers, while the company that rescued it later put the number at about 12,000. Either way, Bench's own notice told customers to request a six month IRS filing extension while they found a new bookkeeper. Three days later, Employer.com announced it would acquire Bench and revive the platform. Customers who stayed got their books back. Customers who had already scrambled to move on did not need to.
A different kind of hit landed on a much bigger scale after Broadcom bought VMware in 2023. A survey of 1,000 VMware users, published in July 2024 by Civo, a company that sells a VMware alternative and has an obvious stake in the answer, found 48 percent already paying more for the same features, with costs doubling for nearly half of those and rising tenfold for 15 percent. By 2025, the picture had not improved. A CISPE-backed European monitoring body reported price increases of up to 1,500 percent for some customers, who signed new multi-year terms, in the group's own words, "often ... under significant pressure," because there was nowhere else to go on short notice.
These are not the same failure. Bench disappeared. VMware's new owner just changed the price. But both show the same thing: the contract you signed does not bind whatever company ends up owning your vendor next.
I have made the cost case before. This is a different one.
I have run the five year math comparing a rented tool's rising subscription against the cost of owning one outright, and tracked how AI usage pricing is moving that math faster than it used to. Both of those posts assume your vendor keeps existing and keeps selling you roughly the same thing, just at a worse price each year. That is the common case. It is not the only one.
I want to steelman the obvious objection here, because it is correct. Most SaaS relationships never get acquired, and most acquisitions do not end in a Bench-style shutdown or a Broadcom-style repricing. Treating every rented tool as a ticking bomb would waste a lot of attention on risks that mostly do not materialize, and building your own version of something out of ordinary vendor anxiety is usually the more expensive mistake. The right question is not whether this could happen to you, since almost anything could happen to anyone eventually. It is which of your tools would actually hurt if it did.
That question has a workable answer. The damage scales with two things: how deep the tool sits in your workflow, and how much of your own data and process logic exist only inside it. A commodity tool you could swap in a week is a rounding error if its owner changes. A tool that your whole team touches daily, that holds your client records or your pricing logic or your scheduling rules, and that has no real substitute you could stand up fast, is a different animal entirely. For that second category, owning the equivalent buys something the cost spreadsheet alone does not price in: you hold the source code, and your data sits in infrastructure your own contract controls, so a transaction on someone else's cap table cannot reset your terms or your access without your consent.
Owning it does not make you immune, either. A contractor can disappear just as abruptly as a vendor, and code nobody maintains rots on its own timeline. The actual difference is who is holding the decision when something changes: you, or whoever just bought the company you were renting from.
Before you renew anything your business actually depends on, ask the vendor two questions the pricing page will not answer: what happens to your data if the company is acquired or shuts down, and how long it would realistically take you to operate without that tool if the answer turned out to be worse than you assumed. If that answer is months, that is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to put a real number on the exposure instead of ignoring it, which is the audit our custom software team runs alongside the cost comparison, not instead of it. If one of your vendors was just bought and nobody has checked what that means for you, that conversation is worth having now, before you find out the hard way.
Sources
References used in this article. Links also appear alongside the relevant claims.
Let's make it happen.
You don't need a polished brief. A couple of lines about where you want your company to go is plenty, and we'll come back with what we'd tackle first.
We scope the work around your goals and timeline before quoting anything, so you know exactly what you're getting.