Price the whole thing, then decide
12 min
The licence is not the cost. The cost is the licence, the internal hours, the training, the thing you have to keep running alongside it for a year, and the renewal.
Three years, uplift in writing
Ask every finalist for a three-year price with the renewal uplift written into the order form. Vendors who will not put an uplift cap in writing have told you something specific about year two, and it belongs in the pricing transparency score rather than in a footnote.
Feed the internal hours from the proof of concept into a total cost model. A cheaper licence that costs a full-time engineer is not cheaper.
The decision meeting
One hour. The owner presents the scorecard. The sceptic argues for the second-placed option, properly and in good faith. Then decide.
Write down why. Publish the decision internally with the scorecard attached. In eighteen months, when someone asks why you are not on the product that is fashionable then, the written reason is the difference between a decision and a habit.
Close the loop
Six months after deployment, write the review. Score the five axes honestly, including the ones where you were wrong. The next team gets their thirty days back, and the axis you were wrong about is the one they most need to read.