Compare free and paid software value.
Free software is rarely free once time is priced. The comparison that matters puts licence cost against the hours the paid tool saves plus the hours the free alternative costs in workarounds, configuration and manual steps — both count toward the same total. The break-even figure is the one to remember: at a fifteen-per-month licence and a forty-five-per-hour loaded rate, the tool pays for itself if it saves twenty minutes a month. Most tools clear that threshold easily, which is why the interesting question is switching cost rather than licence cost.
Free versus paid software value
Net benefit = (hours saved + free-tool overhead) x hourly rate x 12 x seats - monthly cost x 12 x seats; break-even hours = monthly cost / hourly rate
The loaded cost — salary plus employer contributions, benefits and overhead, typically 1.25 to 1.4 times gross salary. Using take-home pay understates the value of time saved by a wide margin.
Because it is a real cost that a licence eliminates. Time spent working around a missing feature, maintaining a self-hosted instance or doing manually what the paid tool automates all belong on the same side of the ledger.
Switching cost, data portability and vendor risk. A tool that wins on this arithmetic can still be the wrong choice if migration takes weeks or if it locks your data in a proprietary format.