A refresh cadence is a forecasting tool, not an upgrade pitch

Refresh cadence is the part of the contract most customers ignore until month thirty. By then it is too late to plan, and the conversation devolves into a quarter-end scramble. We have started writing the refresh window into the calendar at month one, eighteen months out, with a documented review point at month twelve and month sixteen.

This is not a sales tactic. The single most useful thing a device-as-a-service plan does for a CFO is give them a number that does not move. Refresh planning is how you keep that number stable while devices age. If you let refresh go unscheduled, you end up either paying for support on units past their useful life, or eating a lumpy hardware spike that defeats the entire point of the subscription.

We also publish, in the master agreement, the criteria under which we recommend a refresh: battery health below eighty percent on more than fifteen percent of seats, image incompatibility with the current CI baseline, or carrier hardware end-of-support. None of these are aesthetic.