SAP support fees — what you pay, what you actually consume, what the alternatives cost.

Four tiers, three meaningful price points.

Standard Support

List 19% of net licence value per year. Reactive support, SAP Notes, Support Portal access. The default for SAP Business One and select older lines; rare on Business Suite or S/4HANA.

Enterprise Support

List 22% of net licence value per year. The standard tier for Business Suite and S/4HANA on-premises. Includes reactive support plus the Enterprise Support Continuous Quality Check (CQC) framework, EarlyWatch Alert delivery, and the formal SLA on priority-1 issues.

MaxAttention

Premium tier. Custom-priced; typically 4–8 percentage points above Enterprise Support depending on services in scope. Adds dedicated Technical Quality Manager, on-site CQC services, expert-on-demand access. Common for large complex estates and during major migration windows.

ActiveAttention

Lighter premium tier between Enterprise and MaxAttention. Typically 1–3 percentage points above Enterprise. Adds dedicated TQM but lighter on-site services.

The contractual indexation compounds quietly.

Standard SAP maintenance contracts include an annual indexation clause linked to a published price index, capped or uncapped depending on contract age and jurisdiction. Uncapped indexation has produced material annual increases in inflationary periods. Even capped indexation at 3.3% compounds to ~37% over a 10-year window. The negotiation discipline is to (a) read the existing indexation clause, (b) cap it on the next material contract event, and (c) negotiate downward-adjustment language for years where actual inflation runs below the cap.

Rimini Street, Spinnaker Support, and the 50–62% discount.

Third-party support providers offer SAP-equivalent support — bug fixes, tax and regulatory updates, performance support — at typical 50–62% discounts versus SAP's Enterprise Support line. The trade-off is one-way: SAP withdraws future-version rights against the dropped maintenance. The decision is well-suited to stable, optimised ECC estates with no near-term S/4HANA conviction, organisations with internal SAP Basis depth, and organisations facing material cost-out targets.

The discipline is not the discount, it is the contractual exit. SAP's response to a credible third-party-support move is frequently a one-time discount or extended maintenance carve-out. The negotiation is structured: quote third-party support, present the comparative TCO, give SAP a defined window to counter, and execute either way.

Three tactics that compound across a maintenance cycle.

1. Right-size the maintained entitlement. Maintenance is paid on the entitlement, not the deployment. Eliminate shelfware before renewal; transfer maintenance to active entitlement only.
2. Negotiate uplift caps. Convert uncapped indexation to a hard cap (3–4%). Negotiate downward-adjustment language. Multi-year renewal lock-ins extend the cap.
3. Bundle maintenance into transformation events. S/4HANA conversion, RISE migration and material new entitlement purchases are natural moments to restructure the maintenance line.