Opinion: Why Pay More for a DAM?

25th November 2025

Dan Huby is the Chief Technology Officer at Montala, the UK based B Corp behind ResourceSpace.

Last week I visited OnDAM Paris with a few others from the ResourceSpace team and attended case-study talks where organisations proudly described their digital asset management stacks. Serious money, serious vendors, serious acronyms. The kind of platforms where the annual subscription could buy you a small house in the Dordogne.

And I kept having the same thought: why?

Because when you strip away the glossy conference banners and the enterprise-grade vocabulary, I didn’t see anything on stage that ResourceSpace can’t already do. In several cases, I actually saw less.

This isn’t me doing the usual “open source vs. enterprise” routine. It’s genuinely puzzling. You look at the workflows, the metadata structures, the user permissions, the integrations… and you realise that a lot of DAM buyers are paying ten or twenty times more for roughly the same outcomes.

“But the big vendors give you more support.” Do they?

This is the argument I hear most often. If you pay enterprise pricing, you get an army. A pod. A squadron of Customer Success Ninjas.

Except you don’t.

Several contacts of mine, people who’ve worked inside these large vendors, have confirmed something I already suspected: even the highest-paying clients normally get one assigned Customer Success Manager. One named person. One point of contact. Exactly the same as we provide.

So the idea that you’re buying all this extra “weight” behind your contract doesn’t really survive contact with reality. Yes, a bigger company theoretically has more staff somewhere in the building, but that doesn’t translate into ten people actually helping your team day-to-day. It just means a larger payroll.

So what are people paying for?

Honestly? Branding. Perception. Security-through-size.

There’s a psychological comfort in buying from a company with a big booth and a big logo and a big enterprise price. It feels safer. No one gets fired for choosing the option with the highest annual fee.

But the world has changed. Organisations are being told to justify spend, not boast about it. And when the features are comparable and the user experience is often better on the lighter, more focused platforms, the premium becomes very hard to defend.

And here’s the awkward bit: license fees don’t guarantee better software

The huge licence budgets don’t go entirely into product development. They go into sales teams, marketing, partner programmes, sponsorships, and all the things that make a company look like a “market leader”.

Meanwhile, ResourceSpace (which is license-free and open source) puts all of its effort into actual functionality and support. We’re not flying an army of salespeople around the world. We’re not spending vast sums on expo booths. We’re just building the thing and helping people use it.

The Perfume Analogy

There’s a well-known truth in the perfume industry: the cost of the actual fragrance inside the bottle is tiny. Sometimes pennies. The money goes into the brand story: the celebrity face, the full-page magazine spreads, the 40-second slow-motion advert where someone stares into the middle distance on a beach.

People aren’t buying the liquid; they’re buying the feeling that comes with the name on the box.

A lot of enterprise DAM pricing works exactly the same way. The functionality - the “liquid in the bottle” - is often remarkably similar across systems. In some cases, the inexpensive or license-free platforms are more flexible, because they haven’t grown into sprawling legacy architectures.

But the big vendors have the brand. The booths. The sales teams. The glossy brochures filled with phrases like content supply chain and omnichannel delivery, as if renaming familiar DAM concepts somehow makes the system more valuable.

And because of that, buyers subconsciously assume the product must be better, or at least safer, simply because the marketing budget is enormous.

What I’ve learned watching 18 years of DAM buyers

The happiest DAM customers I’ve met over the years have one thing in common: they bought a system that fits their actual workflows instead of their procurement department’s idea of what “enterprise software” should cost.

No one ever says:

“Our DAM works brilliantly but I wish we paid twenty times more for it.”

So the question I keep coming back to is… Why pay more?

If a DAM platform is easy to use, flexible, well supported, and capable of handling all the metadata, workflow, publishing and integration work you actually need then the price tag should reflect the product, not the marketing budget behind it.

ResourceSpace isn’t trying to be the “cheap” option. It’s trying to be the fair one.

The fact that “fair” often looks dramatically cheaper than the incumbents is just a symptom of how distorted the market has become.