The renewal notice arrives with a number on it, a date, and a link that says Renew Now. It rarely explains why the number is higher than last year, never compares itself to anything, and is frequently addressed to somebody who left in 2023. Most offices pay it, because the alternative is to think about it, and thinking about it means first working out what “it” is.
There are only three real options: renew what you have, switch to something else, or use the renewal as the moment to bring several scattered licences onto one date. This guide is a method for choosing between them in about an hour.
Before you decide anything, count
Every good renewal decision starts with a count, and nearly every bad one starts with the seat number printed on the notice. That number was set when the licences were bought and has probably not been revisited since.
Count the machines that exist now:
- desktops and laptops in the office
- any server the software is licensed to cover
- laptops that leave the building
- machines staff use from home for work
- anything attached to equipment — a machine driving a scanner, a till, a piece of practice hardware — that runs a general-purpose operating system
Then count the machines that no longer exist. Offices routinely carry seats for computers retired two years ago.
Business endpoint licences are normally counted per installed device rather than per person, so a member of staff with a desktop and a laptop usually consumes two seats. Renewal is the natural moment to correct a count in either direction. Reducing seats partway through a term is usually not possible, which is an argument for getting this right now rather than resolving to sort it out later.
Option one: renew what you have
This is the right answer more often than a reseller’s website will tell you. If the product is doing its job, the console is in use, and the renewal price is within sight of the market, renewing is cheap in the only currency that is actually scarce in a small office: attention.
Renewing is the better option when the machines are managed by somebody who knows the product, when the renewal covers a corrected seat count, and when nothing about the firm’s obligations has changed.
Two things are worth doing even when you intend to renew. Get one competing quote, so the renewal figure has something to be judged against — a renewal you cannot beat is still useful information. And ask what the price would be on a two- or three-year term, because the difference is frequently larger than anything a switch would save.
Option two: switch
Switching is worth it when there is a real reason, and expensive when there is not. The reasons that hold up:
You are running consumer subscriptions on office machines. Consumer products are generally licensed for personal use, give you no central console, and cannot show coverage to an insurer, a client or an auditor. This is a licensing problem as much as a technical one, and it is the most common genuine reason to move.
The product no longer supports your machines. Older operating systems fall out of support, and a publisher’s current version may simply not install. Find this out during a quote, not after a purchase.
You need something the product does not have. Detection-and-response features, device control, or a reporting format a client keeps asking for.
Nobody can log in to the console. If the administrator left and the account cannot be recovered, you are renewing something you cannot administer, and moving is the cheaper fix.
The reason that does not hold up on its own is price. A saving of a few dollars per seat per year on twenty seats is real money, but it is not obviously more than the cost of deploying a new agent to twenty machines, learning a new console, and discovering whatever does not work on the one old computer in the corner.
Price the switch honestly. Write down the hours it will take somebody to remove the old product, deploy the new one, and get the console into a usable state. Multiply by what that person’s time is worth. Add the price of the disruption on the day. Compare that number, not zero, against the saving.
Option three: consolidate
This is the option nobody is offered and the one that most often pays off in an office that has been buying protection gradually.
The symptom is a calendar with renewals scattered across it: three in March, one in July, two in November. Nobody holds the whole picture, something is always weeks from expiry, and the only thing keeping it alive is an automatic charge on a card that may belong to someone who no longer works there.
Consolidating means bringing every licence onto one anniversary, usually by buying short bridging periods on some of them so that all the terms end on the same day. This is called co-termination, and most business products support it in some form.
It costs something in the year you do it. What you get back is one decision a year instead of six, one invoice, one expiry date to put in the calendar, and the end of the situation where protection lapses on a machine nobody was watching. For an office above about fifteen machines, the administrative saving usually justifies it within two cycles. Below that, it is a judgement call.
Consolidation also tends to reduce the price per seat, because the whole estate is quoted as one quantity rather than as several small ones.
The timing question
Start forty-five to sixty days before the earliest expiry. That is enough time to count properly, get two quotes, and make a decision without the expiry date making it for you.
If you are already inside two weeks, say so in the first message you send anybody. Many business products have a short grace period after expiry, and many can be renewed so that the new term continues from the old expiry date rather than from the purchase date — which matters, because otherwise you pay for days you did not have. Neither is guaranteed, and both are reasons to move sooner.
If a licence has already lapsed, it is still worth asking. Whether the original term dates can be restored depends on the publisher and on how long it has been.
Automatic renewals
If a subscription renews automatically on a card, that arrangement lives in the publisher’s own account, and only whoever holds that login can stop it. No reseller can cancel it for you, and any who says otherwise is not being straight with you.
Find the account, find who controls it, and decide deliberately whether to leave the automatic renewal in place. Automatic renewal is not inherently bad — it is bad when nobody knows it exists.
A short checklist
- Count the machines that exist, including home machines and servers.
- Find your current product, seat count, expiry date and console login.
- Get the like-for-like renewal price and one competing quote.
- Get the two- and three-year prices for both.
- If you are considering switching, write down the hours and price them.
- If your dates are scattered, ask what consolidating onto one anniversary costs.
- Decide, and put the next expiry date in a shared calendar with a reminder sixty days out.
Where we fit
Corelink quotes renewals for products we did not originally sell, which is most of them. Send the product name, the seat count and the expiry date and we will come back with the like-for-like renewal, at least one comparable alternative, and the cost of consolidation if your dates are scattered — including when the honest answer is that your existing renewal is the best of the three.
Our licence renewals page describes how that works, and endpoint security covers the case where the answer turns out to be moving from consumer subscriptions to a managed product.