We Rent You Software Too. Here Is the Difference.

Let us get the awkward part out of the way. Compendium365 is a subscription. You pay every month, and if you stop paying, the software stops. Anyone selling you business tools in 2026 and claiming otherwise is either giving them away or being loose with the word "own".

So if the subscription is not the difference, what is? It is the answer to one question, and we think it is the only question that actually matters when you are choosing who to depend on:

What am I left holding the day I stop paying?

Ask your current vendors. The answers vary more than you would expect. Some leave you with a folder of ordinary files. Others leave you with an account you can no longer sign into, holding work in a format nothing else opens, behind an export button that is only available on the tier you just cancelled.

That second arrangement is not a subscription. It is a deposit you never get back. And it is the reason "just switch" is so much harder than it sounds — the switching cost was designed in.

Our answer, in writing

Cancel Compendium365 and your documents are still .docx, your spreadsheets are still .xlsx, and your PDFs are still PDFs. They sit on your own computers and open in whatever you like — including our competitors' software. CompendiumPDF, CompendiumWP and LECX are desktop applications: they install on your machines and run offline, so there is no cloud for us to lock you out of. Mail and VPN can be run on your own server if you would rather not take our word for it.

None of that is generosity. It is what happens when a company decides its retention should come from the product being worth paying for, rather than from how expensive it is to leave.

And yes, it costs less

One suite covers documents, spreadsheets, email, PDF editing and secure remote access, on one login and one bill, instead of five vendors with five renewal dates. Seats are sold in packs of five and every further pack costs less, so growing a team makes the per-seat price go down rather than up. The price you see when you pick your seat count is the price you pay.

The bar we would like everyone held to

We would rather compete on whether the software is good and the price is fair than on how much of your work we are holding. Before you renew anything this year — us included — ask what you would walk away with. Make everyone answer it.