Can you give an example of some of the services you are using where you are seeing these problems?
Perhaps you shouldn't be purchasing a 12 month advanced contract, instead of going month to month which would solve many of your issues.
Or perhaps you don't need all the shiny-newness of every new services?
Maybe your business is different than ours, (or any business I've worked at in the past), but from my experience, we pick a tool - MailChimp for example. Does it have every feature of every other mail service? No. Does it do 90% of what we need? Yes. What about the other 10%? Well, does some feature that MailChimp doesn't have provide a significant improvement to our business? If so, then you need to have it. Do you build it yourself? Find another supplier? Or, more likely, it doesn't have a HUGE impact, and you can figure out how to make things work.
I'd be curious to understand what is so unique about how your business is using these services that you are experiencing this problem.
Or, are you looking for a problem to solve and this is how you posed the question?
Great perspective. ESP, analytics vendors and BI tools are a few of the categories where "usage' has forced me into licenses that require annual subscriptions. Seems many of those companies do offer month to month options, but those are typically situated for low volume levels (emails/month sent, # of monthly API calls, etc.).
Personally, the biggest pain I've had is around poor implementations and core missing features that are only realized during implementation (some of my projects have had tricky technical & privacy requirements). In all those cases we either made do or spent far more time than estimated in building workarounds.
Perhaps you shouldn't be purchasing a 12 month advanced contract, instead of going month to month which would solve many of your issues.
Or perhaps you don't need all the shiny-newness of every new services?
Maybe your business is different than ours, (or any business I've worked at in the past), but from my experience, we pick a tool - MailChimp for example. Does it have every feature of every other mail service? No. Does it do 90% of what we need? Yes. What about the other 10%? Well, does some feature that MailChimp doesn't have provide a significant improvement to our business? If so, then you need to have it. Do you build it yourself? Find another supplier? Or, more likely, it doesn't have a HUGE impact, and you can figure out how to make things work.
I'd be curious to understand what is so unique about how your business is using these services that you are experiencing this problem.
Or, are you looking for a problem to solve and this is how you posed the question?