Glossary
Price creep
A subscription's cost rising over time through increases small enough that none of them prompts a review. Each one clears the same approval the original charge did, so the tool is never re-evaluated at its new price.
How does price creep happen?
Usually three ways at once. The vendor raises list price at renewal and the increase is applied automatically. Seats are added through the year and never removed when people leave. A plan is upgraded for one feature and stays upgraded after the need passes. None of these is a decision anybody would defend individually; the total is the thing worth arguing about, and the total is what nobody sees.
How do you spot price creep in a ledger?
By comparing a vendor's charges against their own history rather than against a budget. A vendor billing $180 a month is unremarkable. The same vendor billing $180 where it billed $95 eighteen months ago is a 90 percent increase nobody approved as a 90 percent increase. The ledger holds both figures, which is what makes the comparison possible at all.
The comparison needs a full history rather than a recent window. A tool that reads only the last ninety days sees the current price and calls it normal. Related: duplicate tooling, which often appears alongside price creep for the same reason.
Every term in this glossary is defined from the general ledger, because that is the one place a company's whole software estate is already written down. See how a software spend audit reads a ledger for what that involves.