TCO FAQ

The TCO Calculator helps you estimate and compare the Total Cost of Ownership for different SAP deployment models (on-premise, private cloud, public cloud). It highlights cost drivers and provides transparency to support your business case and transformation planning.

The results show an estimated total cost of ownership over a defined period (typically 5 years), including infrastructure, licenses, maintenance, and project costs. It is a simulation tool — results are indicative and should be validated before making investment decisions.

The accuracy of your TCO simulation depends directly on the quality of your input data. If you are unsure about your figures, we recommend creating an inventory of your IT and financial data and verifying it with your IT and Controlling departments before running the simulation.

Below is a short description of each cost item. You do not need to fill in every field — use the items that best reflect your organization’s TCO.

Hosting costs (€/year): These include the costs for the infrastructure and capacity required to run your SAP systems — such as virtual servers, storage, backup environments, and disaster recovery. Example: annual charges from your hosting provider or internal IT infrastructure unit for the ECC production and non-production systems.

Hosting service costs (€/year): Refers to the managed services that keep the technical platform operational — for instance, system monitoring, patching, backup management, operating system and database administration, or incident handling.
Example: managed service provider fees or internal IT operations team costs.

Additional annual license costs (€/year): Covers software licenses beyond the core ERP license — such as add-ons, engines, connectors, or third-party components used with the ECC system. Example: licenses for SAP add-ons (e.g., integration middleware, billing engines) or non-SAP software required for data exchange.

Costs for the core ERP system (excluding maintenance) (€/year): Represents the base cost of the SAP ERP license itself, excluding the yearly maintenance fee. Example: the amortized or lease-equivalent cost of your SAP ECC license.

Maintenance costs (€/year): Includes the annual SAP maintenance fees (typically around 22% of the SAP license base) and any comparable costs for database or third-party software maintenance. Example: SAP Enterprise Support fees or database vendor maintenance contracts.

One-time license purchases (annualized) (€/year): Reflects the average yearly value of occasional, one-off license purchases — for example, new modules or additional user licenses acquired in recent years. Example: periodic license extensions for growth or functional expansion.

SAP Active / Max Attention (€/year): Applicable if your company subscribes to SAP’s premium support or advisory services, providing direct access to SAP experts, proactive monitoring, and service-level governance. Example: annual SAP Active Attention or Max Attention subscription fees.

Support costs (€/year): Captures the application management and functional support activities for your ECC system. This may include both internal staff and external AMS provider costs, covering incident resolution, change management, and user support.
Example: annual contract with your AMS partner or the cost of your in-house SAP support team.

Depreciation (€/year): Used to represent the depreciation of capitalized assets related to the ECC system, such as on-premise hardware or software licenses. Example: yearly depreciation of remaining server assets or capitalized SAP licenses.Item description

Click “Enable AI” to let the system prefill fields with benchmark values that correspond to your company’s profile. You can overwrite these with your own data at any time. Please note that AI data quality depends on the AI provider’s benchmarks and may vary by industry and region.Item description

If your main systems (e.g., ERP) are hosted on-premise, select “On-premise.” You can also run two separate scenarios — one for your cloud-hosted systems and another for on-premise environments. Item description

Use the “Add Cost” button under “Other Recurring Costs” to include any cloud services you already consume. You can also add costs for ongoing projects or initiatives in the same section.v

No. The calculator can be used by any organization considering or comparing SAP or similar ERP hosting models. The benchmark data is generalized and not tied to specific SAP customer data.

You can start with approximate values or use the AI autofill option. The more accurate your inputs, the more reliable the results. You can always refine the data later as you validate figures internally.

Yes. Your work is automatically saved under your user account. You can modify or further refine your TCO case simply by using the Duplicate function, which will allow you to do a versioning of your case. You can return and continue from where you left off at any time during your active subscription.