SAP third-party support replaces your SAP maintenance contract with an independent provider, and the published customer cases cluster around one number: about half the annual fee. For twenty years the catch was the way back. Leave SAP support, and returning meant paying for every year you were gone, plus a reinstatement fee on top.
That changed on July 10, 2026. SAP’s own support site now caps the penalty for coming home at six months of fees. So the question has moved. It used to be “can we afford to leave?” Now it’s “what are we buying with the money we save?”
My view, stated early so you can argue with it: third-party support is a financing decision wearing a support decision’s clothes. It makes sense when you know what you’ll do with the time it buys. It’s an expensive way to postpone a decision when you don’t.
What SAP Third-Party Support Actually Is
You own a perpetual SAP license. Every year you pay SAP maintenance on top of it, which buys you bug fixes, security patches, legal and tax updates, new enhancement packages, and access to SAP’s support organization. Third-party support (3PS) means you stop paying SAP for that and pay an independent company instead. The license stays yours. ECC keeps running exactly as it did the day before.
What the providers take over, per their own service descriptions:
- Break/fix support for standard SAP code, and for your custom code and interfaces (SAP’s own support stops at its standard code).
- Tax and regulatory updates, which the provider researches and writes for the countries you operate in.
- Security, delivered as monitoring, “virtual patching,” and compensating controls rather than SAP’s code fixes (more on that below, because it’s the real trade).
- An assigned engineer or team instead of SAP’s ticket portal.
The names you’ll hear are Rimini Street, the best known and the only one listed on Nasdaq; Spinnaker Support; and Support Revolution, a UK provider. Rimini announced in June 2025 that it will support all SAP ECC 6.0 and S/4HANA releases through 2040, for new and existing clients.
One distinction trips people up. Third-party support is not AMS (application management services). An AMS firm runs your system day to day: tickets, small changes, monitoring. A 3PS provider replaces SAP as the vendor behind that work. Plenty of companies have both, and some 3PS providers sell both.
Maintenance is also the cost line that outlives every project. The implementation ends; the support invoice doesn’t. If you’re building the full picture, it belongs next to the numbers in our SAP implementation cost breakdown, not in a separate budget nobody revisits.
What SAP Maintenance Costs, and What Third-Party Support Saves
SAP Enterprise Support, the default tier for most customers, runs about 22% of your net license value every year. Standard Support is cheaper; licensing advisers quote it anywhere from 17% to 19% depending on the contract and its vintage. One advisory’s worked example makes the scale concrete: a maintenance base of $4.5 million produces a maintenance bill of roughly $1 million a year.
That 22% wasn’t always the rate. SAP’s standard maintenance sat around 17% for most of the 2000s before the move to Enterprise Support. Michael Doane, writing about the installed base in The SAP Green Book (SAP PRESS, 2012), described the relationship the fee sits inside:
“If for no other reason than sunk cost, very few clients ever switch out from SAP for something else. As such, SAP clientele is a captive audience. Before you license SAP software, you are pursued. Once you license, you have become ‘acquired.'”
The fee has kept moving since. SAP raised maintenance 3.3% at the start of 2023 and another 5% effective January 1, 2024, according to sourcing advisory UpperEdge. That’s the backdrop every 3PS sales pitch is written against.
So what do the providers save you? Here is every published number I could trace, with who produced it and who paid for it. Read the third column before the second.
| Claim | Number | Who published it | What it measures |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hankook Tire, SAP ECC 6.0 (2021) | 50% | Rimini Street press release | Annual maintenance fees |
| Cubic Corporation, SAP ECC (Feb 2026) | 50% | Rimini Street press release | Annual maintenance fees |
| Valoir Research (2022) | 50% fees; up to 75% total | Report made available by Rimini Street | Support fees vs SAP; total internal application support costs |
| Nucleus Research, Color Spot (2011) | 55.2% | Nucleus case study of a Rimini client | Ongoing ERP maintenance costs, SAP R/3 |
| Spinnaker Support | 62% average; 50% to 60% “typical” | Spinnaker’s own website | Support costs vs SAP contract |
| Rimini Street 2040 announcement (2025) | “Up to 90%” | Rimini, as reported by CIO.com | Annual maintenance, best case |
| Redress Compliance (2026) | “Around half” of the SAP fee | Independent licensing advisory | Annual support line, stable ECC |
Every case where a named customer put its name to a number lands at about half. The 75% and 90% figures are total-cost or best-case framing. None of this is audited the way a financial statement is, and nearly all of it was produced or promoted by the companies selling the service. Still, when a buyer-side advisory with no 3PS product lands in the same place, “about half” is a fair planning number.
Worth keeping in proportion: on a $1 million bill, half is $500,000 a year. That’s real money. It’s also a few senior consultants for a year at the rates in our SAP consultant rate table, which is roughly what an S/4HANA program will ask you for later.
What You Give Up When You Leave SAP Support
The savings are in every brochure. The costs are in none of them, so here they are.
SAP’s Code Fixes Stop
This is the big one. On third-party support you no longer receive SAP Security Notes or support packages. Your provider defends the system from the outside instead: intrusion detection, configuration hardening, virtual patching. Spinnaker’s own comparison table describes it plainly as “compensating controls.”
Here’s why that matters. In April 2025, SAP disclosed CVE-2025-31324, a missing-authorization flaw in NetWeaver Visual Composer scored 10.0, the maximum. Rapid7 found it had been exploited in the wild since at least March 27, 2025, mostly against manufacturers. SAP shipped a code fix. A company on 3PS got whatever its provider could build around the hole. That can work. It can also be the paragraph your auditor asks about, so ask your security team and your auditors before you sign, not after.
No New Releases, and You Must Archive First
You freeze on the release and enhancement package you’re on. Before the SAP contract ends, you download and store every support package, enhancement package, and note you’re entitled to; the providers run this as a formal archiving project. Miss something and it’s gone.
Tax and Legal Updates Come from the Provider
Payroll tables, e-invoicing formats, statutory reports: your provider writes these now. Test them like any other transport. A country you entered last year is a good question for the sales call.
Your S/4HANA Path Runs Back Through SAP
Third-party support doesn’t give you S/4HANA. When you’re ready to move, you negotiate new licenses or a RISE subscription with SAP, or you return to SAP maintenance first. That conversation just got cheaper (next section), but it still happens.
Here’s how the four support paths for ECC compare, using SAP’s own published dates:
| Path | What you pay | SAP code fixes | How long | Getting out or back |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAP Enterprise Support (mainstream) | About 22% of net license value a year | Yes | To end of 2027 for ECC on the latest three enhancement packages | Standard renewal terms |
| SAP extended maintenance | Base plus two percentage points on the maintenance basis | Yes | 2028 to end of 2030 | Opt-in; a bridge for longer conversions |
| SAP customer-specific maintenance | Same base fee | No new ones; known problems only | After mainstream or extended ends | Automatic if you choose nothing |
| Third-party support | About half the SAP fee, per published cases | No; compensating controls instead | Rimini promises 2040 | Return capped at six months of SAP fees since July 2026 |
Look at the third row twice. A company that simply does nothing after 2027 keeps paying SAP’s full rate for a product that no longer gets new fixes. That’s the path a lot of ECC shops are drifting onto without deciding to.
The July 2026 Rules Changed the Exit and the Return
In September 2025 the European Commission opened a formal antitrust case into SAP’s on-premise maintenance practices. On July 9, 2026 it closed the case by making SAP’s commitments legally binding, with no fine and no finding of wrongdoing. The commitments took effect July 10, apply to SAP customers globally, and run for ten years, watched by a monitoring trustee. SAP lists the details on its maintenance and support commitments page. The parts that matter for third-party support:
- No reinstatement fee. Fully waived for anyone returning to SAP support.
- Back-maintenance is capped at the lower of 50% of the fees you’d have owed while away, or six months of fees.
- The all-or-nothing rule is gone. You can split your estate into separate “Commercial Installations,” and each can have SAP support, another provider, or no support. SAP handles split requests within six months; they take effect on the next January 1, April 1, July 1, or October 1. A split doesn’t trigger license repricing or restart your initial term.
- Some shelfware can finally be dropped. Licenses for products already in customer-specific maintenance, failed implementations where SAP carries the blame, insolvency, and workforce cuts of more than 10% over two years can be terminated, with their maintenance.
Run the return math on that $1 million example. Leave for three years and, under the old model, coming back could mean paying for all three: the Commission’s own preliminary finding was that in some cases these fees matched what customers would have paid had they never left. Under the new cap, the back-maintenance is the lower of $1.5 million or six months of fees. Call it $500,000, after saving roughly $1.5 million while you were gone.
That’s the fact SAP’s account team won’t lead with, for obvious reasons. It also cuts the other way: the 3PS sales team will present it as a free option. It isn’t free. It’s cheap.
Watch the calendar, too. SAP’s terminations under these commitments run on three months’ written notice before the end of the initial or renewal term, and your own contract sets the rest. Spinnaker points out that for calendar-year renewals that can put the practical deadline at September 30. Check your agreement’s actual dates; don’t take a vendor’s word, or mine, for your renewal terms.
Forrester’s read of the settlement is the sober one: customers have more bargaining power now, but the decision “does not delay ECC support deadlines” and doesn’t change SAP’s roadmap. The new terms make exiting safer. They don’t make staying on ECC forever a plan.
Bottom line: Since July 10, 2026, leaving SAP support is no longer a one-way door. Returning costs at most six months of fees, and you can move part of your estate instead of all of it. Price the decision on those terms, not the pre-2026 ones most articles still describe.
When SAP Third-Party Support Makes Sense (and When It Doesn’t)
Start with SAP’s own dates, from its maintenance strategy page. Mainstream maintenance for Business Suite 7, including ECC 6.0 on the latest three enhancement packages, ends at the end of 2027. Extended maintenance runs from 2028 to the end of 2030 at a premium of two percentage points. After that comes customer-specific maintenance. S/4HANA carries an innovation commitment to the end of 2040. Systems on enhancement packages 0 to 5 already left mainstream maintenance at the end of 2025.
You won’t be alone in deciding late. Gartner, as reported by CIO.com, estimated that only about 14,000 of 35,000 ECC customers had moved to S/4HANA by the end of 2024, with 17,000 likely still on ECC at the 2027 deadline and 13,000 at 2030.
It Makes Sense When
- Your ECC system is stable, heavily customized, and your S/4HANA date is after 2030 or genuinely undecided. You’re paying for innovation you won’t install.
- You’re on enhancement package 5 or lower. You’re already out of mainstream maintenance, so the SAP fee is buying less than it used to.
- S/4HANA is three or more years out and needs funding. In the 2022 Valoir interviews, the “planners” were doing exactly this: using the savings to pay for the eventual move.
- Part of your estate is frozen for good (a divested business, a legacy instance you only report from). The split rules now let you move just that part.
It Doesn’t When
- Your conversion starts within about two years. Brownfield conversions commonly run 12 to 24 months, by one advisory’s estimate, and you’ll want SAP’s tools and fixes during the project. Extended maintenance is the cleaner bridge. Our S/4HANA migration guide covers the sequencing.
- Your auditors or regulators need vendor code fixes, and nobody on your side wants to own a compensating-controls argument.
- Your estate is mostly custom-built SAP solutions. UpperEdge, which advises on both sides of this decision, flags those customers as a weaker fit.
- Your roadmap depends on SAP’s AI features, most of which ship in the cloud editions, not ECC.
Notice that none of those turn on the provider. They turn on your S/4HANA date. Third-party support is a way to hold ECC steady while something else happens, so the question is what that something is and who’s going to deliver it. That’s a matching problem, and it’s what our engine is built for: describe your system and your timeline, and watch it rank the SAP firms that fit. Free, no signup.
How to Vet a Third-Party SAP Support Provider
The providers will send you response-time SLAs and engineer-tenure averages. Those are claims until they’re in the contract. What to ask instead:
- How exactly do you handle a critical SAP vulnerability on my release? Walk me through what you did for CVE-2025-31324.
- Which countries’ tax and legal updates do you write, and how late do they typically ship after a rule changes?
- Is our custom code in scope, and is there a cap on hours or incidents?
- Put the response and resolution targets in the contract, with credits when you miss them.
- How do you archive our entitlements before the SAP contract ends, and who signs off that nothing is missing?
- What does exit look like if we return to SAP or move to S/4HANA? What help do you provide, and what does it cost?
- Are you, or have you been, in litigation over your support methods? Spinnaker’s own buyer guide tells you to ask this, which tells you something.
- Can we see your financial statements? You’re betting a decade of support on this company existing.
On the litigation question, the history is public. Oracle sued Rimini Street in 2010 over how it accessed and copied Oracle software to support clients. The fight ran for 15 years; in December 2024 the Ninth Circuit vacated much of a ruling against Rimini, and in July 2025 the two settled, with Rimini agreeing to wind down its Oracle PeopleSoft support by July 31, 2028 and neither side admitting wrongdoing.
SAP has been on the other side of this, too. Its former subsidiary TomorrowNow sold third-party support for Oracle products. In 2011 TomorrowNow pleaded guilty to federal charges over illegal downloads and paid a $20 million fine, and in 2014 SAP agreed to pay Oracle $306 million to end the civil case. The pattern across both stories: the business model is legal. The methods are what get litigated. So ask about methods.
If you’re sorting the SAP firm types while you’re at it, 3PS providers sit alongside the categories in our guide to types of SAP partners, with one difference: they have no reseller relationship with SAP, which is the point.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is SAP third-party support legal?
Yes. You own a perpetual license, and hiring someone other than SAP to support it is legal. The court cases in this market (Oracle v. Rimini Street, and SAP’s own TomorrowNow case) were about how providers accessed and copied vendor software, not about whether third-party support may exist. Ask any provider how it works and whether it is in litigation.
How much does SAP third-party support save?
Named customer cases cluster around 50% of the annual SAP maintenance fee: Hankook Tire and Cubic Corporation both cited 50%, and a 2011 Nucleus Research case measured 55.2%. Providers advertise higher figures, up to 90%, but those are total-cost or best-case numbers. On a 22% Enterprise Support fee, plan on roughly half.
Can you go back to SAP support after leaving?
Yes, and since July 10, 2026 it costs far less. SAP waives the reinstatement fee and caps back-maintenance at the lower of 50% of the fees you skipped or six months of fees. These terms come from SAP’s commitments to the European Commission, apply globally, and run for ten years.
Does third-party support cover S/4HANA?
Yes, for on-premise releases you already license. Rimini Street says it will support all ECC 6.0 and S/4HANA releases through 2040, and Spinnaker and Support Revolution also list S/4HANA. What 3PS can’t give you is a new S/4HANA license or a move to RISE; those still come from SAP.
Do you still get security patches on third-party support?
Not SAP’s. SAP Security Notes and support packages stop when SAP maintenance stops. Providers protect the system with monitoring, hardening, and virtual patching around the vulnerable code. Whether that satisfies your auditors and regulators is a question to settle with them before you sign, especially for internet-facing systems.
What is SAP support services?
SAP’s own maintenance offerings for licensed software. Enterprise Support, the most common tier, costs about 22% of net license value per year and includes fixes, security notes, legal updates, and new enhancement packages. Standard Support is cheaper and narrower. Large customers can negotiate Product Support for Large Enterprises (PSLE) instead.
What is the third party process in SAP?
A different topic that shares the name. In SAP SD and MM, third-party order processing means a vendor ships goods directly to your customer while you handle the sales order and billing. It is a sales and procurement process. It has nothing to do with replacing SAP’s maintenance contract, which is what this article covers.
Sources
- SAP, SAP Maintenance & Support Commitments effective July 10, 2026: reinstatement waiver, back-maintenance cap, landscape split, termination scenarios, notice terms.
- SAP, Maintenance strategy: the 2027, 2030, and 2040 dates, the two-point extended-maintenance premium, customer-specific maintenance.
- European Commission, press release IP/26/1554 (July 9, 2026): the commitments and the Commission’s preliminary concerns, case AT.40823.
- Forrester, analyst blog on SAP’s EU settlement: the analyst read on what the settlement does and doesn’t change.
- Michael Doane, The SAP Green Book (SAP PRESS, 2012): quoted in the section on maintenance costs.
- Rapid7, Active exploitation of SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer CVE-2025-31324: the vulnerability example.
- CIO.com, Rimini Street extends SAP support until 2040 (June 2025): the 2040 commitment, “up to 90%” claim, Gartner migration estimates.
- Rimini Street, Hankook Tire press release (2021) and Cubic Corporation press release via Business Wire (February 2026).
- Valoir Research report, as announced by Rimini Street via Business Wire (August 2022): fee and total-cost figures, customer archetypes.
- Nucleus Research, Rimini Street Case Study: Color Spot (2011).
- Spinnaker Support, SAP support page, its A-to-Z guide to third-party support, and its September 2026 notice-deadline post: savings claims, compensating controls, archiving, buyer questions.
- UpperEdge, SAP vs. 3rd Party Support: fee increases and fit caveats.
- Voquz Labs, Reducing Annual SAP Support and Maintenance Costs: the maintenance-base example.
- Redress Compliance, SAP ECC End of Support 2027: third-party support at around half the base fee; conversion duration.
- Oracle and Rimini Street settlement agreement (SEC filing, July 2025); InfoWorld, coverage of the $306 million TomorrowNow settlement.
Third-party support buys you years at half price. Just make sure you know what you’re buying them for. When the answer is a migration, the next decision is who runs it, and you can browse SAP firms by module, industry, and size before anyone sends you a proposal.
