Who actually does the work?

The same person you speak with in the first call reads your contracts and writes your brief. There is no junior analyst layer and no offshore review team. Software is used to organise documents and surface candidates, and every conclusion in the brief is a human judgment made against the paper.

What happens if the review does not find much?

That is a legitimate outcome and you get told plainly. A portfolio that is genuinely in good shape gets a short brief confirming it, with the two or three watch items that will matter at the next cycle. You are paying for an informed opinion, and sometimes the informed opinion is that you are fine.

Do we need to buy the Venduris platform to use this?

No. Every engagement is standalone and the brief is a document you own outright, readable without any login. Teams that want the calendar kept current after the assessment often move to the platform or the Renewal Desk, but neither is a condition of the work.

How is this different from a contract AI tool?

Extraction tools tell you what a document says. They are useful and they are only the input here. The difference is the conclusion: which of two conflicting clauses governs, whether a threat is credible, what to trade and what to refuse. That judgment comes from having sat on both sides of these negotiations, and it is what you are paying for.

How do you handle confidentiality?

An NDA is signed before a single document is shared. Contracts are handled on a need-to-know basis for the engagement only, are never used to benchmark against a named third party, and are deleted on request once the engagement closes.

What information do you need to begin?

Your contracts as PDFs (master agreements, order forms, and amendments), plus any vendor list and renewal dates you already track. If the documentation is incomplete, the work proceeds with what exists and the gaps are flagged explicitly in the brief rather than guessed at.

How long does an engagement take?

Assessments are delivered within 5 business days of receiving your contracts. M&A exposure reviews take 5 to 10 business days depending on portfolio size. Negotiation support runs alongside your renewal cycle, and the Renewal Desk is a rolling monthly arrangement you can end with 30 days notice.

Can you negotiate with the vendor on our behalf?

The Negotiation Support engagement is deliberately done-with-you rather than done-for-you. Your team stays in the room, because the relationship and the internal context belong to you. Positioning, counter-language, live debriefs between rounds, and redline review of returned paper are handled together.

Advisory services

Know what your contracts commit you to, before the vendor tells you.

Your agreements get read the way the vendor's team reads them: line by line, in the order they were signed, with the amendments that override them. What comes back is a position you can act on, not a list of extracted dates.

Discuss an engagement See a sample brief

NDA signed before anything is shared
Fixed fee agreed up front, never hourly
A written brief you own outright

Renewal intelligence brief. A written position on your renewals: deadlines, exposure and leverage, with the reasoning behind each call.

of the paper read: master agreement, order forms, amendments, side letters

business days from kickoff to a written position in your hands

software commitment required to run any engagement

Five ways to work together

From a single contract to owning the whole calendar.

Start with one assessment. Move up when the renewals keep coming. Every engagement is scoped and priced before it starts.

Engagement	Type	Best moment	Scope	From
Renewal Readiness Audit	One-off assessment	Delivered in 5 business days	10 to 40 vendors	$1,500
Pre-Renewal Strategy Brief	One-off assessment	Best used 90 to 120 days before deadline	Per vendor	$900
Negotiation Support	Done-with-you	Runs alongside your renewal cycle	Per negotiation	From $2,500
M&A Contract Exposure Review	One-off assessment	Delivered in 5 to 10 business days	Deal portfolio	$5,000
Renewal Desk	Ongoing retainer	Monthly, cancel with 30 days notice	Full portfolio	From $1,900 per month

Renewal Readiness Audit

One-off assessment

Best when: You cannot say, with the contracts in front of you, what your company is committed to over the next six months.

Every agreement in your portfolio gets read: master agreement, order forms, amendments, and the side letters that quietly override them. What comes back is not a list of extracted dates. It is a ranked view of where you are actually exposed, which deadlines are still recoverable, and which vendor conversations need to start this month.

What you get

Renewal timeline reconstructed from the signed paper, not the invoice history
Notice deadlines ranked by whether you can still act on them
Escalation and uplift clauses read in the context of what you already pay
Termination and exit rights assessed for whether they are practically usable
A prioritised action list, with the reasoning behind each call

Pre-Renewal Strategy Brief

One-off assessment

Best when: One renewal matters more than the others and it is 90 to 120 days out.

The vendor's account team started preparing for this renewal months ago, with a quota, a playbook, and a view of your alternatives. This brief closes that gap: where your leverage genuinely sits, which of your options the vendor will resist hardest, and what a realistic outcome looks like before anyone quotes a number.

What you get

Leverage assessment: what you hold, what you only appear to hold
Your pricing structure read against how this vendor typically packages
Scenarios costed out: renew, renegotiate, right-size, or exit
The concessions worth trading, and the ones to refuse outright
An opening position, a target, and a defined walk-away point

Negotiation Support

Done-with-you

Best when: You have the strategy and you want someone experienced in the room with you while it plays out.

Your team runs the negotiation. You are not left to interpret the vendor's moves alone. Positioning is set before the first call, counter-language is drafted for the responses you are likely to get, and every round is debriefed while the next one is still open. When paper comes back, it gets read before you sign.

What you get

Pre-call positioning and message framing for each stakeholder
Drafted counter-language for the vendor's standard objections
Live debrief after each round, with the next move decided together
Redline review of returned paper before signature
Escalation guidance when the account team stops moving

M&A Contract Exposure Review

One-off assessment

Best when: You are acquiring or being acquired, and the target's software contracts have not been read commercially.

SaaS agreements carry deal risk that legal diligence routinely misses because it is commercial, not legal: change-of-control triggers, assignment restrictions that block integration on day one, and multi-year escalators that inflate the run-rate you are underwriting. All of it surfaced before close, quantified against the deal timeline.

What you get

Change-of-control and assignment clauses across the target portfolio
Integration blockers identified against your day-one plan
Auto-renewal exposure mapped to the expected close date
Multi-year escalation modelled into the forward cost base
An EBITDA impact summary written for the deal team

Renewal Desk

Ongoing retainer

Best when: Renewals arrive continuously and nobody in the company owns the calendar.

The function a procurement team would give you, without the headcount. The renewal calendar becomes someone's job. Vendors that matter get a brief before their window opens rather than after, and when an account team makes an unexpected move you have someone to call the same day.

What you get

Rolling renewal calendar, owned and kept current
Pre-renewal brief ahead of every material vendor window
Same-week judgment call when a vendor changes terms or pricing
Quarterly portfolio review with the finance owner
New agreements reviewed commercially before they are signed

Prices are the starting point for the scope shown and are confirmed in writing before any work begins. Nothing is billed hourly.

How the work is done

Extraction is the input. Judgment is the product.

Pulling dates and clauses out of a contract is the easy part, and it is where most tooling stops. What follows is the part that changes the outcome of a negotiation.

Stage 01

Read the paper, all of it

Master agreement, every order form, every amendment, and the side letters that quietly override the terms above them. Contracts contradict each other more often than people expect, and that is usually where the exposure is sitting.

Software gives you: Returns the dates and values it can find in each document.
This review gives you: Works out which document actually governs when two of them disagree.

Stage 02

Reconstruct the commercial history

What was agreed originally, what changed at each renewal, and what the trajectory says about the vendor's intent. A 7% uplift means something different on a contract that was already discounted 40% than on one that was never negotiated.

Software gives you: Reports the current price and the stated escalator.
This review gives you: Reads the pattern across renewals and names what the vendor will ask for next.

Stage 03

Locate the real leverage

Timing, credible alternatives, switching cost, and which parts of the agreement the vendor's account team cares about more than you do. Most buyers overestimate the leverage they hold and miss the leverage they actually have.

Software gives you: Cannot see your alternatives, your politics, or the vendor's quota pressure.
This review gives you: Weighs all three and tells you which threat is credible and which is bluff.

Stage 04

Write the recommendation

Not a risk register handed back for you to interpret. A position: what to do, what to trade, what to refuse, and where to stop. Written so it can be forwarded to a CFO without translation.

Software gives you: Produces a list of findings.
This review gives you: Makes the call, states the trade-offs, and stands behind it.

The frameworks behind this are published, not hidden. Read the negotiation playbook, the renewal timeline, or the preparation checklist.

The deliverable

Judge the output before you pay for it.

A redacted page from a real brief. Vendor details are removed, the structure and the depth are not.

Renewal Intelligence brief

Vendor 04 (collaboration suite)

Page 3 of 11

Notice window

Closes in 34 days

Proposed uplift

+9.4% on renewal

Exit rights

Present, not usable

Finding

The order form states a 60 day notice period. Amendment 2, signed 19 months later, extends it to 90 days without restating the original clause. The date tracked internally is based on the order form and is already wrong by 30 days.

Price trajectory across renewals

Initial term

Renewal 1

Renewal 2

Proposed

Recommended position

Serve notice this week to preserve optionality, then reopen. Anchor on flat renewal against a 21% reduction in unused seats. Concede a 24 month term only if the uplift cap moves to CPI. Walk-away point and fallback language are set out on page 7.

What you receive

8 to 14 pages per assessment, written in plain commercial language
One page per material vendor, plus a portfolio summary for the CFO
Every finding cited back to the clause and document it came from
PDF you own outright, with no platform login required to read it

The brief is written to be forwarded. Finance teams take it into budget conversations and IT teams take it into vendor calls without anyone having to rewrite it first.

What reviews keep surfacing

The same six problems, in portfolio after portfolio.

Anonymised patterns from real assessments. No client names, no invented savings figures, just what tends to be sitting in the paper.

The notice date in the tracker is not the notice date in the contract

It usually comes from the original order form, while a later amendment quietly extended the period. The gap is typically 30 days and it is discovered too late.

Auto-renewal with an exit right nobody can practically use

Termination for convenience exists, but only in a window that opened before the internal approval cycle could realistically complete. The clause reads as protection and functions as a lock-in.

Uplift caps that cap the wrong thing

The cap applies to list price rather than the discounted price actually paid, so a capped increase still lands well above the headline percentage.

Seat counts that only ever ratchet upward

Mid-term additions become the new floor at renewal. A team that grew and then shrank pays for the peak indefinitely unless the baseline is renegotiated explicitly.

The signer has left the company

Nobody remaining knows what was verbally agreed alongside the contract, and the vendor's account team has changed too. Institutional memory sits entirely on the vendor's side.

Two agreements covering overlapping functionality

Separate teams bought adjacent tools in different years. Neither contract is unreasonable on its own. Together they represent duplicated spend that only shows up when both are read side by side.

How it works

Getting started takes 20 minutes, not 20 meetings.

Send us your contracts and we handle the rest. No procurement overhaul. No system integrations.

Step 1

Send your contracts

MSA, order forms, amendments: PDFs are fine. Plus renewal dates and a vendor list if you have one.

Step 2

We scope and confirm

We confirm timing, sign your NDA, and begin within one week of first contact.

Step 3

Receive your brief

A structured intelligence brief in 5 business days, ready to brief your team or take into negotiations.

Step 4

Act with leverage

Use your brief to negotiate, right-size, or exit on your timeline, not the vendor's.

Most of these renew before you negotiate them

Without proactive action, many renewals introduce 10%+ pricing changes before negotiations even begin.

DropboxShopifyHubSpotSlackZapierNotionFigmaAtlassian

IntercomMailchimpZoomDatadogAsanaMiroTwilioSalesforce

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Answers to what teams ask most before starting an engagement.

How mature is your renewal process?

Ten questions, two minutes, no email wall to see your score. You'll get a clear read on where your renewal process is exposed and what to fix first.

Take the 2-minute assessment

Let's look at your next renewal together.

Thirty minutes with the founder. We map your upcoming renewals, flag the notice windows that are about to close, and you decide whether Venduris is worth your time.

Book a renewal review Take the 2-minute assessment