SolarWinds renewal quotes in 2026: what customers are reporting

An 18-year SolarWinds customer described their 2026 renewal on Reddit. The first quote was a 180% increase. After three or four rounds of negotiation, the final offer came down to a 40% increase, locked into a three-year term. They left anyway.

That thread is not an outlier. Over the past twelve months, r/Solarwinds has filled up with renewal stories that follow the same shape. The numbers vary, but the pattern does not.

The reported numbers

These are figures customers have posted publicly, not official pricing. Treat them as data points, not a rate card.

A team paying $35K every three years was quoted over $100K for the next three. A $7,900 annual renewal came back at $19,936. A $9.5K perpetual maintenance bill became a $30K+ subscription quote, and that was after a 43% loyalty discount. One customer reported $13K to $110K. Another was quoted a 334% increase as the opening offer, which dropped to an 80% increase after they refused. Database Performance Analyzer customers reported multi-year quotes where the "discounted" years still landed 200% to 276% above their previous renewal.

The spread is wide because the opening quote is not the price. Several customers reported that showing a competing quote, refusing the three-year term, or simply saying no cut the increase dramatically. One team said a 50% increase and a mandatory three-year term became a 15% increase on a one-year term after they put a Zabbix quote on the table.

Why this is happening

The mechanics matter more than the outrage. SolarWinds, now owned by the private equity firm Turn/River Capital, is retiring perpetual licensing and moving all customers to subscription, typically on three-year terms. When your renewal arrives, you are not being quoted a year-over-year increase on your old agreement. You are being re-quoted under an entirely different licensing model. One customer shared their rep's written explanation: the jump reflects "the current model rather than a standard year-over-year rate increase."

That distinction explains why the increases look so extreme and why they are partially negotiable. The list price of the new model is high. The floor, for customers willing to push, is lower. But the floor is still above what most teams were paying, and the multi-year term is the part reps concede last.

There is also a second-order trap worth knowing about. Customers who accepted multi-year subscription deals report that the attractive first-year price was an introductory rate, with contractual increases built into years two and three. Read the year-three number before you sign, not the year-one number.

The three responses we see

Reading a year of these threads, customers land in one of three places.

Some pay. Usually large environments running six or more modules, where replacing SolarWinds means replacing three to five separate tools, and the switching cost genuinely exceeds the increase. Their own words: "we would swap it for 3-5 other tools so we wouldn't really save much."

Some negotiate hard and buy a year. Refusing the three-year term, escalating through the reseller, and arriving with a competitor's quote are the moves that reportedly work. This is a delay, not a resolution. You will have the same conversation in twelve months, from a weaker position.

And a growing number leave. To open source stacks, to other commercial platforms, or to purpose-built alternatives. The 18-year customer. The 20-year customer. Teams that describe themselves as loyal until the quote arrived.

What to do before your renewal lands

Whichever camp you expect to be in, do the work before the quote arrives, because the quote tends to arrive late. Customers report waiting a month or more for renewal pricing, sometimes receiving it close enough to expiry that evaluating alternatives becomes impractical. That compression is not an accident you should plan around; it is the reason to start early.

Audit what you actually use. Renewal quotes price the modules you own, not the ones you touch. Many teams found they were paying for modules that one dashboard and a script could replace.

Get a real exit quote. Not a list price from a website. A like-for-like quote against your node count and module list, from at least one credible alternative. Even if you stay, it is the only leverage that reliably moves the number.

Check your perpetual rights. If you still hold perpetual licenses, customers confirm the software keeps running without a support contract. That is a fallback position worth understanding before you trade it away for a subscription.

And put the renewal date in your calendar minus 120 days. The teams that got run over are the ones that started the conversation with 30 days left.

Where Sensaka fits

Sensaka is a unified infrastructure operations platform for data center teams: network and server monitoring, hardware-level visibility through out-of-band collection, asset truth, and configuration management in one place. Teams evaluating a SolarWinds exit use us to consolidate NPM-style monitoring with the hardware and asset layers that generic tools miss.

If your renewal is coming, send us your module list and node count. We will return a like-for-like quote you can put on the table, whatever you decide to do with it.

Further reading: explore SolarWinds Alternatives, Multi-Vendor Hardware Monitoring, Sensaka DCOS, and Redfish & IPMI Reference.