In the United States, health insurance usually comes with the job, and the employer decides which drugs it pays for. When the new weight-loss drugs arrived at about $1,350 a month per person, most large employers said no. The ones that said yes felt it: six in ten of the biggest say the drugs hit their pharmacy budget hard.
Then the price moved. Novo Nordisk now sells Wegovy straight to patients for $349 a month, 74% below list, payable by card with a prescription.
The employers’ answer stayed put. KFF’s survey of almost 2,000 US companies, published last week, finds fewer than one in five large firms cover these drugs for weight loss, the same as a year ago.
The refusal reads exactly as before, but its effect has changed. At $1,350 a month, saying no meant most staff went without. At $349, anyone with a prescription can buy it themselves, so the refusal now decides just one thing: who pays. The company has quietly lost its seat at the table.
Every rule carries a price assumption that nobody writes down. When the price falls far enough, the rule stays on the books and stops doing its job. Software is about to go through the same thing, on a much bigger scale.
For twenty years, business software ran on a simple bargain. The vendor owned the only door. Leaving meant a migration project, retraining and real risk, so customers paid whatever the renewal said. Gartner finds renewals often rise 10% to 20% or more, while IT budgets grow by less than 3%. When Broadcom bought VMware, most customers saw their bills jump by more than a quarter, and some saw them double or worse. Almost all of them paid.
That bargain rested on one assumption: building software was hard, so only the vendor could do it. That assumption is going. More than 36 million people joined GitHub, the main home of code, in a single year. Lovable, a tool that lets people with no coding background build apps by describing them, says its users now start a million new projects a week, and alongside websites and online shops they are building their own CRMs, inventory systems and HR tools. AI is a large part of why, but the effect is simpler than the technology: making software is no longer reserved for people who make software.
Companies are already acting on it, often without asking. In a 2026 survey by Retool, which sells tools for building software, 35% of its customers and users had replaced at least one paid tool with something they built themselves, and six in ten had built software outside IT’s oversight. Schleswig-Holstein, a German state with about 30,000 workstations, moved roughly 80% of its desks to the free LibreOffice and expects to save more than €15 million in licence fees.
None of this empties the big vendors overnight. A Gartner analyst expects more than a third of VMware workloads to move elsewhere by 2028, which means most will stay. But lock-in worked because leaving was harder than paying, and that gap is closing. The vendors that held their customers hostage will lose them at the edges first: the next tool, the extra seat, the renewal where someone finally has somewhere else to go. Cutting prices or suddenly listening helps less than they hope, because the customer has learnt something that can’t be untaught. The renewal has become a negotiation.
Inside your company, the rules haven’t caught up. They were written when the only way to get software was to buy it, so they guard the purchase. A team that builds its own tool never reaches procurement, because nothing is bought. Meanwhile the big renewal slides through unchallenged, because it always has. What deserves guarding now is what’s left once software is cheap: where the data lives, who owns each tool, and whether this year’s renewal still beats the alternative.
Somewhere, a benefits deck is being copied into 2027 with last year’s price still on the slide. A few doors down, a software renewal is being signed by someone who never checked for a way out.
If someone in your company signs your software renewals, send them this one.
David
Sources: KFF, 2026 Employer Health Benefits Survey, 22 Oct 2026. Novo Nordisk, Wegovy list and self-pay prices, read 26 Oct 2026. Gartner (23 Oct 2025) and Gartner’s Mike Tucciarone via CIO.com (12 Dec 2025); Gartner’s Julia Palmer via The Register (11 Sep 2025); CloudBolt survey via Ars Technica (17 Feb 2026). GitHub, Octoverse 2025, 28 Oct 2025. Lovable via TechCrunch, 9 Jun 2026 (company figures). Retool, Build vs Buy Report 2026 (817 customers and users). Land Schleswig-Holstein, press release, 4 Dec 2025.