SolarWinds Tries a Broadcom Pricing Move, and Customers Push Back
The price hike landed with the wrong kind of confidence
SolarWinds customers are angry, and the anger has a very specific shape. Everyone in IT has sat through the "software got expensive again" movie before, so that alone wouldn't explain it. The complaint is sharper: SolarWinds seems to be looking at Broadcom's VMware playbook and assuming it can run the same move, with higher prices, forced multi-year subscription commitments, less room to negotiate, and a sense that customers will grumble, curse in meetings, and then pay because the pain of leaving is worse than the pain of staying. That's where the comparison starts to crack. VMware sits deep in the foundation of many environments. Network monitoring, as painful as it can be to replace, doesn't always have the same gravity. One frustrated customer put it bluntly: SolarWinds is not Broadcom, and SolarWinds does not have a VMware-level product.
That makes this backlash feel different from ordinary renewal-season rage. Customers are saying the quote is too high, and also that SolarWinds may have misread its own leverage. A company can raise prices when customers feel trapped, or when the product is so central that leaving would be an existential project. If customers believe they can swap the tool in a day, three days, or even a few weeks, the pricing strategy starts to look less like a power move and more like a dare. A lot of admins sound very ready to take that dare.
The Broadcom comparison is the insult and the warning
Broadcom's VMware price hikes have become shorthand in infrastructure circles. You don't have to explain every licensing detail anymore. Say "Broadcom" and people understand the mood: shock renewals, bundling pressure, subscription moves, and customers trapped between a brutal bill and a brutal migration. Getting compared to that is not flattering for SolarWinds. It means customers are filing the company into the same mental folder as vendors that decided loyalty was less useful than leverage.
The most interesting part is that customers don't think SolarWinds has earned Broadcom-level leverage, and the original complaint basically laughs at the idea. VMware replacement can be a major architectural event. It touches compute, storage, operations, disaster recovery, automation, staffing, compliance, and the weird habits every company has built around its virtualization stack. Replacing SolarWinds can still be messy, especially in a mature environment with years of dashboards, custom alerts and reporting rituals, but it doesn't always require the same organizational surgery. For some shops, network monitoring is important but swappable, and that distinction matters.
One commenter said they had already ripped out VMware because of Broadcom and would rip out SolarWinds next. That's a dangerous customer mindset for a vendor, because the pricing behavior is creating muscle memory on top of resentment. Once an IT team survives one painful vendor exit, the next one feels less impossible. The first migration teaches procurement, leadership and engineering that the scary thing can be done. So when SolarWinds comes in with a forced three-year subscription commitment, some customers aren't thinking "we have no choice." They're thinking "here we go again."
There's also bruised pride in the response. Customers are basically telling SolarWinds to know its place. That sounds harsh, but in vendor relationships perceived importance is everything. If a product is truly irreplaceable, customers behave differently: they negotiate carefully, complain without much noise, and build roadmaps around the vendor's roadmap. When they start saying "stay in your lane," they have stopped treating the company as infrastructure royalty and see a tool that got too full of itself.
The alternatives are imperfect, but that may be enough
The first escape route mentioned was PRTG, which the original poster described as cheap and good enough for their organization. Then came the twist: other customers jumped in to say PRTG had also changed its licensing model and, according to some, tripled prices. That undercuts the fantasy that customers can jump from one greedy vendor to a clean, cheap paradise. A lot of monitoring vendors are chasing the same subscription money. One commenter summed it up with weary simplicity: many monitoring tools changed their model because that's how they make more money.
That still doesn't save SolarWinds. PRTG possibly being more expensive now gives SolarWinds no free pass; it just makes the replacement conversation more complicated. Customers are looking across Zabbix, LogicMonitor, PRTG, Domotz and other options with the pragmatic eye of people who don't expect perfection. They aren't always after the best tool in the abstract. They want one that gets them out of a renewal trap.
Zabbix got a lot of attention because it is the cleanest emotional break from the subscription squeeze. Someone simply said, "Zabbix is not," meaning it wasn't part of the same price-hike club, which is a powerful pitch in a market full of vendors trying to turn every feature into recurring revenue. Zabbix also comes with the usual tradeoff: more manual work, more setup, more tuning, and a greater need for internal skill. One person said it can be a solid option if you're okay doing the manual work. Another said a proof of concept showed that everything they needed was custom, which meant more spending on support. Free has a cost; it just shows up in a different column.
LogicMonitor split the room too. One customer said they moved there because it handled a lot of the manual work and felt better than SolarWinds. Another said LogicMonitor is better but significantly more expensive. Someone else said they hated it because things that were easy in SolarWinds became custom work in LogicMonitor. Every exit customers face has friction, with its own pricing, learning curve and annoyances. Once SolarWinds changes the math enough, though, those annoyances stop being dealbreakers and become evaluation criteria.
The customers are mad, and they're doing math
The most damaging comments are the ones with numbers, more than the angriest ones. One customer said a $35,000 renewal turned into $180,000. Nobody absorbs that with a sigh and a little budget shuffling. It means a meeting, an escalation, and a "thanks, but no thanks" moment where the team decides not to renew support while it moves to something else. When a renewal gets that large, the incumbent advantage starts to collapse. Migration suddenly has a budget and replacement has executive attention, so what used to be "maybe someday" becomes "start this quarter."
This is where SolarWinds may be making its most dangerous assumption. A company can count on inertia only up to a point. Every admin knows the value of not touching something that works. Monitoring stacks are full of local knowledge: weird SNMP quirks, alert suppressions, old maps, NOC screens, device groups, maintenance windows, and reports that exist because one executive asked for them five years ago. That mess is a moat, but a moat can dry up when the renewal quote gets stupid enough.
Some customers are now weighing the cost of downtime, migration labor, consulting, support and retraining against the cost of simply staying. That's bad news for SolarWinds, because the moment customers run that analysis, the relationship changes. SolarWinds used to be the default. Now it has to justify itself against alternatives, internal labor, and the possibility of "good enough." For any mature vendor, losing default status is brutal. You can still win the deal, but now you have to fight for it.
The fight is emotional as well as technical. The original poster brought up the SolarWinds hack as part of the reason the company shouldn't act like it has unshakable leverage. That's a raw nerve. Customers remember trust failures, ugly incidents, and whether a vendor made them look bad internally. When a company with that baggage turns around and pushes a forced three-year commitment, some customers hear arrogance instead of strategy. Besides asking "can we replace this?", they're asking "why are we rewarding this?"
There are three camps now, and none of them are great for SolarWinds
The first camp is done. These customers say they'll rip SolarWinds out, skip support renewal, or move to anything that breaks the cycle. They may underestimate the work, hit painful gaps during migration, or discover that the replacement tool is less polished in exactly the places they took for granted. Emotionally, though, they're gone, and SolarWinds can win them back only with a dramatic change in price, posture or product value.
The second camp is angry but practical. These customers know SolarWinds still does some things well. One person said LogicMonitor required custom work for things that were easy in SolarWinds, and that matters. SolarWinds has real usability in certain workflows, and for some teams ripping it out might create more chaos than savings. These customers may stay, but they'll negotiate harder, demand concessions and keep alternatives warm. They aren't loyal so much as temporarily unconvinced that leaving is worth it.
The third camp sees the whole monitoring market moving in the same direction. PRTG, LogicMonitor, SolarWinds and others are all part of a broader shift toward subscription revenue and higher pricing. From that angle SolarWinds isn't uniquely evil, just another vendor doing what software vendors do when investors want growth and recurring revenue. This camp is the most sober, and it isn't exactly comforting. If every vendor is raising prices, customers may put more energy into open-source options, smaller tools, hybrid stacks or aggressive vendor rotation.
That's the irony. A market-wide subscription squeeze may make customers less trusting of all commercial monitoring vendors instead of getting them to accept the new normal. Once buyers decide every vendor will eventually pull the same move, they design for exit from day one. They avoid deep customization, keep documentation cleaner, ask harder questions about data portability, and treat renewals like risk events. Software companies don't want that kind of customer relationship, but they're training people to build it.
SolarWinds' real problem is that customers now believe leaving is possible
The loudest message in this discussion has little to do with "PRTG is better" or "Zabbix is free" or "LogicMonitor is worth it." SolarWinds customers are no longer convinced they're trapped, and that's the shift. A vendor can survive complaints as long as customers feel stuck. It can survive bad jokes, angry threads and ugly renewal meetings. It has a much harder time once customers realize the door exists.
Maybe that door leads to Zabbix and a pile of manual work. Maybe it leads to LogicMonitor and a higher bill with less hassle, or to PRTG, even with PRTG's own pricing baggage. Maybe it leads to some mixed setup where SolarWinds stays for one module while everything else gets peeled away over time. The exact destination matters less than the direction of travel. Customers are planning exits, comparing notes and testing assumptions, and they're openly questioning whether SolarWinds deserves the confidence it's pricing into these renewals.
SolarWinds may think forced subscription and multi-year commitments are the grown-up software business model, and in a spreadsheet maybe they are. Customers buy trust, usefulness, and the belief that the vendor understands its place in their world. Right now a lot of them think SolarWinds has mistaken installed base for loyalty and inconvenience for dependence.
That's a dangerous mistake. Broadcom could push VMware customers around because the product sits so deep that many organizations had to pay before they could plan. SolarWinds may not have that luxury. Monitoring is important, but for many teams it is not sacred, and when a tool that isn't sacred starts acting untouchable, customers start reaching for the pry bar.