Consumption-based pricing & cloud bill shock

SAP marketing likes to celebrate digital transformation as a limitless ERP paradise, but our analysis of the license terms reveals this promise of salvation to be a minefield of absurd costs. Proof: see photo of my colleague, which he brought back from the DSAG Technology Days 2026 in Hamburg.

A toxic construct in this profit maximization by SAP is indirect use and the Digital Access licensing model introduced in 2018. The SAP world was once simple, because people sitting in front of a screen needed a classic named user license. But in the age of IoT, RPA and AI, machines, bots and third-party systems communicate directly with the ERP, prompting SAP to rigorously monetize these indirect data flows.

With the Digital Access model, SAP has established outcome-based licensing, in which the sheer number of documents initially created in non-SAP sources and imported into the SAP core is counted and calculated, rather than the actual user. The absurdity of this is that customers have to pay for documents generated by external systems, even if the initiating person has long had an expensive SAP user license. The list prices for this digital entry into the ERP system are so abstrusely high that SAP also had to lure me into the new model with temporary discount programs (DAAP) of up to 90 percent: this is not a customer-friendly solution, but a strategic tool for merciless monetization.

The historic transition from traditional, perpetual on-prem licenses to cloud subscriptions is often presented as a flexible liberation for us existing customers, but in my organization it turns out to be a sophisticated instrument for maximizing revenue growth for SAP. At the heart of this paradigm shift is consumption-based pricing, a consumption-based billing model that is primarily used on SAP BTP via agreements such as the Cloud Platform Enter-prise Agreement (CPEA) or the newer BTP Enter-prise Agreement (BTPEA).

In theory, this concept promises maximum agility, as customers can activate and pay for cloud services as and when they need them without having to purchase rigid, long-term software licenses. However, the commercial reality for us existing customers is much more dangerous: We acquire a fixed budget in advance in the form of so-called cloud credits, which are then continuously eroded as the services are used.

The toxic mechanism behind this is that unused cloud credits expire without replacement at the end of each contract year, which puts us IT managers and my CCoE managers under massive pressure worldwide.

However, if we exceed the purchased quota, the dreaded Cloud Bill Shock looms, as any overuse is relentlessly billed at the undiscounted list price unless renegotiated in good time. In addition, SAP regularly changes the metrics, prices and availability of BTP and BDC (Business Data Complexity, see photo), which makes reliable long-term budgeting almost impossible.

noname@e3mag.com