Ask your PLM vendor one plain question: what happens to our released revisions, change orders, and approval signatures the day we stop paying? On a rental model, the honest answer is usually an export window, a read-only tier, or a services quote to pull your own records out in a format the next system can actually read.
That history is not the vendor’s product. It is years of your engineering decisions: why the wall thickness changed, who signed the deviation, which supplier lot went into which serial number. Auditors, customers, and your own engineers need it long after a contract term ends. When it lives inside a subscription, every renewal turns into a negotiation over access to your own past.
N23D is built the other way. The vault is local-first and stays on your hardware, and one native Rust binary reads it, so the same part identity carries through CAD, PLM, QMS, and the business workflows that sign off on it. Permanent license: the software that opens your history keeps opening it whether or not you renew support. Entra signs people in; it does not hold your records.
One platform. Full digital thread. If your release history only stays readable while the invoice is current, you never owned it. You rented it.
Photo: Maksym Kaharlytskyi / Unsplash