For more than 14 years, The SAM Club has provided independent software licensing advice, untainted by the interests of software reselling — our commitment is to our clients’ financial benefit. With SolarWinds now under new ownership, we believe customers should understand the implications before committing to their next renewal. We’ve been monitoring the situation and have some insights to share.
A note on how we put this together: we’ve only just come across the scale of the SolarWinds price increases ourselves. Using AI technology at The SAM Club, we’re now checking monthly for any fresh information available online regarding client software we track in Monday.com, so we can flag pricing and licensing changes early, not just for SolarWinds. A new board will soon be made available for our clients to access.
In February 2025, SolarWinds agreed to be acquired by San Francisco private equity firm Turn/River Capital in an all-cash deal valued at around $4.4 billion, with the transaction completing shortly after. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before — Turn/River had already steered Paessler’s PRTG onto a subscription-only footing back in 2024, so it comes as no surprise to see SolarWinds head the same way once the deal closed.
Many of the observations below are based on publicly available information, customer reports, community discussions and industry commentary as of July 2026. Licensing policies and commercial terms may vary by customer and geography.
What’s Changed Since the Acquisition
- Subscription-only, no exceptions. Industry reports indicate that from 1 August 2025 SolarWinds moved new and renewing customers to a subscription-only model, with perpetual licensing no longer being offered for new purchases. Existing perpetual customers may continue operating their current deployments subject to their support and maintenance arrangements.
- Built-in escalators. Some customers have reported annual uplift clauses of approximately 10% within multi-year agreements. The true cost compounds over the life of the contract.
- Bundling over flexibility. Orion modules such as NPM, SAM, NCM, NTA and IPAM are increasingly packaged into tiered bundles like Hybrid Cloud Observability (HCO), rather than sold as standalone components. If you only need one or two modules, you may find yourself paying for capability you’ll never use.
- Consumption surprises. Some customers have reported changes in licensing consumption behaviour following platform upgrades and the enablement of additional monitoring capabilities. Organisations should review licensing impacts carefully when expanding monitoring coverage.
- Perpetual customers under pressure. If you’re still running on a perpetual licence, expect to be steered towards subscription at your next renewal point, with existing Orion modules gradually falling out of active development focus.
The Numbers Being Reported
Several customers and industry commentators have reported renewal increases ranging from 100–300%, with isolated reports of higher increases. Actual renewal outcomes appear to vary significantly depending on product mix, contract structure and licensing model. An increase of this size can represent 2–5% of the entire annual IT budget, a serious line item, particularly when working to tight cost constraints or running modern, cloud-native environments that don’t sit naturally alongside SolarWinds’ traditional polling-based architecture. Example: A £50,000 annual renewal subject to a 100% increase becomes £100,000 in Year 1. With a further 10% annual uplift, the three-year commitment could exceed £331,000 compared with £150,000 under the previous arrangement.
It’s a familiar story. We saw comparable dynamics play out with Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, and the underlying logic is the same: private equity ownership tends to prioritise predictable, growing subscription revenue over the flexibility that perpetual licensing once offered customers.
So, What Are Your Alternatives?
- Negotiate before you renew, not after. The earlier you start reviewing your position, the more leverage you may retain. Push for module-based licensing rather than accepting a bundled tier by default, even though SolarWinds doesn’t guarantee this option.
- Interrogate the bundle. Before agreeing to move onto HCO or a similar package, map out exactly which modules and capacity you actually use today. It’s not unusual for the bundle to cost more than your existing standalone modules.
- Look at the wider monitoring market. Evaluate alternatives, such as ManageEngine OpManager, Paessler PRTG, OpenText Operations Bridge, LogicMonitor, Datadog, Dynatrace or open-source platforms such as Zabbix. Any move should be weighed against migration effort, feature parity, and the reality of retraining your team.
- Watch your consumption. Given the reports of unexpected node consumption, it’s worth building in a regular internal review of your SolarWinds estate — particularly after any platform upgrade — so you’re not caught out mid-contract by charges you didn’t plan for.
- Model the full contract term, not just the renewal quote. With annual escalators now common, a three-year commitment needs to be assessed on its total cost, not the headline renewal figure. What looks like a manageable increase in year one can look very different by year three.
Where This Leaves You
If your SolarWinds renewal falls within the next 12 months, now is the time to model the financial impact of the new licensing approach. Waiting until a renewal quote arrives may significantly reduce your negotiating leverage and limit the time available to properly evaluate alternatives.
At The SAM Club we can help assess your current SolarWinds estate, challenge renewal proposals, model the long-term financial impact of licensing changes and compare alternative solutions before you commit to a new agreement.