Key points
- If the RISE offer is $4M a year and the honest crossover, the right-classified count, and the conversion credit together move it just 6%, that is $240,000 a year, $1.2M across a five year term.
The move is a crossover, not a leap
The first thing to model is the one SAP presents as settled: whether, and when, moving actually pays against staying. A migration is not a single price, it is two cost paths over time. Staying on your current system carries the ongoing maintenance run rate. Moving carries the RISE subscription plus the one-time migration cost and the dual-running period where you pay for both worlds at once. Those two cumulative paths cross at some point, and where they cross, the payback year, is the number that tells you whether the deal in front of you is good, bad, or merely urgent.
Seeing the crossover changes the conversation entirely. A RISE offer that never pays back within a sensible horizon is not a migration, it is a subscription you were talked into on a deadline. One that pays back in a couple of years, after the migration and dual-run costs are absorbed, is a real case. The playbook builds both paths, including the year-one double cost that vendors gloss over, so the move is evaluated as the multi-year investment it is rather than the foregone conclusion it is sold as.
app.isvcosell.com/tooling/rise-with-sap
Stay versus move as two cumulative cost paths, including the year-one dual-run, meeting at a payback year that decides the deal.
THE SAME JOB, TWICE
TODAY, BY HAND
The migration is presented as inevitable and the maintenance deadline as a countdown, so the deal is accepted rather than priced.
An analyst attempts the stay-versus-move comparison in a spreadsheet and quietly omits the year-one dual-run cost the vendor glossed over.
SAP's proposal classifies users generously in its own favor, and nobody has the evidence to answer with a different count.
The installed base, the maintenance run rate, the conversion credit, the shelfware cleanup, never gets established as leverage before the deadline arrives.
Weeks of ad hoc modeling under deadline pressure, most of it conceded
WITH ISVCOSELL
Open the RISE playbook and build stay versus move as two cumulative cost paths, including the migration cost and the year-one dual-run, meeting at a payback year.
Right-classify the FUE count from what users actually do, so SAP's proposed number of advanced users meets the number your usage supports.
Clean the base first: retire inactive users, drop shelfware maintenance, and address digital access on your own terms before SAP prices from it.
Decompose the offer against the benchmark and the conversion credit your installed base should earn, so the deadline meets a priced position instead of panic.
An afternoon to a crossover model and an auditable count
What changes: weeks of consulting-grade modeling become an afternoon in the playbook, and the deal gets priced instead of obeyed. If the RISE offer is $4M a year and the honest crossover, the right-classified count, and the conversion credit together move it just 6%, that is $240,000 a year, $1.2M across a five year term.
PART TWO
Right-classify the users before you count them
The pricing engine of a RISE deal is user classification, and it is where the most money quietly moves. RISE prices on Functional User Equivalents, a weighted count where an advanced professional user costs far more than a self-service or occasional one. SAP's opening proposal tends to classify generously in its own favor, counting more users at higher tiers than your actual usage supports. Right-classifying them, mapping each user band to what people genuinely do, and weighting accordingly, can move the FUE count substantially, and the FUE count is the deal.
This is the SAP equivalent of reclaiming idle seats: the negotiation is won in the composition, not the headline discount. A proposal at a given discount on an inflated FUE count is worse than a smaller discount on an honest one, and the only way to know the difference is to build the classification from evidence rather than accept SAP's. The playbook makes that count auditable, so when SAP proposes a number of advanced users, you can answer with the number your actual usage supports, which is a very different starting FUE and therefore a very different price.
"SAP prices the move on how it classifies your users and how urgent it can make the deadline feel. Both are yours to contest, and the deal lives in the contest."
PART THREE
The installed base is leverage, not a liability
The framing SAP most wants you to forget is that your existing position has value in the new deal. You are not walking in empty-handed. Your current maintenance run rate is the anchor the RISE subscription must beat to justify itself, your existing investment supports a conversion credit that should be reflected in the offer, and the cleanup you do first, retiring inactive users, dropping maintenance on shelfware, addressing digital access on your own terms, all reduces the base SAP gets to price from. Every one of those is leverage you carry into the migration if you establish it before you negotiate, and forfeit if you do not.
The deadline is real but it is not only your problem. SAP has its own fiscal pressure and its own strong interest in moving its base to RISE on schedule, which means the urgency runs in both directions even though only one side talks about it. A buyer who has modeled the crossover, right-classified the users, and quantified the installed-base credits arrives at the deadline with a priced position rather than panic, and a priced position is what turns a deadline from a threat into a shared incentive to close.
app.isvcosell.com/tooling/rise-with-sap
The RISE offer decomposed: right-classified FUE, benchmarked discount, and the conversion credit your installed base should earn.
BEFORE YOU MOVE
Pricing the S/4HANA migration
1 Model the crossover. Build stay-versus-move as cumulative cost paths, including the year-one dual-run, and find the payback year that decides whether the deal is real.
2 Right-classify the FUE. Map users to what they actually do and weight accordingly. The count, not the headline discount, is where the money moves.
3 Clean before you price. Retire inactive users, drop shelfware maintenance, and address digital access first, so SAP prices from a smaller, honest base.
4 Bank the installed-base credit. Your maintenance run rate is the anchor and your investment earns a conversion credit. Establish both before the deadline, not after.
THE HONEST LIMIT
A model, not a reason to stay
Modeling the migration is not an argument against moving, and for many organizations S/4HANA is the right destination on its own merits, technical and strategic, that a TCO chart does not capture. The crossover tells you the economics; the decision also weighs capability, roadmap, and risk that are genuinely SAP's strengths. The point is to make the move a choice you priced, not a deadline you obeyed.
What the modeling removes is the asymmetry SAP builds the whole conversation around, that they know the numbers and you feel the pressure. Once you have the crossover, the honest FUE count, and the installed-base credits, you are negotiating a large, multi-year investment on equal informational footing, which is the only footing on which a deal this size should ever be signed. The move may still be inevitable. The price is not.
About the author
Fredrik Filipsson, Cofounder, ISVCOSELL
Fredrik has spent more than twenty years in enterprise software, with time at Oracle, IBM, SAP, and Salesforce before moving to the buy side. He structured and priced the kind of large agreements most buyers only see once or twice in a career, which taught him where the leverage sits and how far a vendor will actually move. He started ISVCOSELL to hand that knowledge to every sourcing team.
More posts by Fredrik Connect on LinkedIn →
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