Top 5 ways to reduce the costs of Software Escrow within your Business

Software escrow agreements are commonly used by companies of all sizes across the globe. Software vendors use these agreements to protect their IP and demonstrate best practice, whilst their clients are looking to secure their continued use of critical software applications and the investments into them.

Most businesses are eager to save on expenses and are continuously looking at ways of cutting costs.

This post identifies areas in which you as a business can find ways to reduce your software escrow costs

1. Agreements: Use a standard template agreement provided by a leading software escrow vendor. These agreement templates are usually provided free of charge and provide a good basis to implement a fair software escrow arrangement. Once solicitors start amending these template agreements, the legal costs can sky rocket. It is also important to understand the fees that your software escrow vendor will charge for a non-standard agreement. These fees can range between £200 – £1,000 per agreement.
2. Setup Fees: Identify the setup fees charged by your software escrow vendor. These fees can be excessive and cost upwards of £1,200 before any tangible work has been carried out. There are a few reputable software escrow vendors in the market that have a policy of not charging a setup fee.
3. Inclusive Deposits: Software escrow vendors usually include a limited number of annual deposits within the scope of their agreement. Additional deposits often carry additional charges and can range in price from £150 to £400 per deposit. You should confirm if your software escrow vendor provides the option for automatic deposits directly from online Git repositories such as GitHub or Bitbucket. This option allows for unlimited automatic deposits (daily if required) and is far more economical than manual deposits. The additional benefit of automatic deposits is the assurance that the source code in escrow is always up to date.
4. Verification Fees: Verification of the deposited source code is an option typically requested by the beneficiary of a software escrow arrangement. These tests provide assurance to the beneficiary that the deposited source code is complete, can be decrypted and compiled into a working application. Verification fees amongst software escrow vendors vary considerably. It is worthwhile evaluating your options between the leading software escrow vendors to identify the best value with the available expertise. A ‘Full Verification’ typically ranges from £5,000 to £12,000 between similarly qualified software escrow vendors. There are also consultant expenses to consider for any travelling that may be required.
5. Identify Critical Applications: Within any organisation, there may be software escrow agreements in place for applications that aren’t being used any longer or would not be deemed as critical. As an annual exercise it would be worthwhile to liaise with each department within your business to identify if software escrow agreements are still required for each application.

Escrow London supports companies of all sizes with their software escrow requirements. We have a pragmatic approach to ensure that our clients only pay for the services they need. Unique to Escrow London is that our fair fees are published here on our site.

We have a full range of accreditations including ISO27001 specifically for software escrow, and we are one of the few global software escrow vendors that offer automatic deposits directly from Git repositories.