Why there is no
price list.

A rate card looks like transparency, and for plenty of products it is exactly that. For software that has to fit a five-person firm and a hundred-person one, a single published figure is really a decision about which of the two it was written for. Everybody else pays for that decision.

What a published price is actually saying

Publishing one number means choosing the buyer it suits, then holding everyone else to it. Firms larger than that buyer get the better end of it. Firms smaller than that buyer pay for capacity they will never open.

Where the product is genuinely the same for everybody, that is fine and the rate card is the honest option. A domain name costs what it costs. Software built around a trade business is not in that category. The same platform might carry five people putting timesheets in from one site, or a hundred and forty across eleven projects with subcontractor payments, plant registers, CIS verification and a CDM file running through it. Those are not the same product in any sense that reaches the invoice.

So the question is not really whether a price is published. It is whether the thing being priced is the same for you as it is for the firm the number was written for.

What sizes the figure

When a price is quoted rather than listed, a few things do the work. For Unibuild they are these four, and knowing them is what lets you sanity-check a quote instead of taking it on trust.

1. Your firm, once. The figure is sized to the firm on the day it is quoted, then fixed for three years. Taking on more people never changes it, because logins are unlimited and nothing is charged per seat.
2. What you actually do. Electrical, mechanical, fit-out, temporary site services and waste collection each lean on a different part of the system. The trade decides which screens get opened every day and which are never opened at all.
3. What gets built for you. Your forms, approval routes, reports and wording are built rather than approximated. The build is settled before you commit, and the figure covers it.
4. Where you work. Turnover per head is not the same in central London as it is in a market town in County Durham. Charging both the same is not even-handed. It is just easier to put on a web page.

None of the four is a count of seats. If a quote moves only when your staff number moves, you are looking at per-user pricing with a longer sales process in front of it, and what that does to a firm is worth reading before you sign.

Who publishes a price, and who does not

It would be convenient for us to claim that publishing nothing is normal, so it is worth being precise instead. Plenty of products in this market print a rate on the page. Plenty ask you to get in touch. The split is not random and it has very little to do with how straight the vendor is.

A seat price is easy to print because the seat is the whole model: one number, multiplied.

Once a fee is sized to the firm rather than counted per login, there is no single figure that is true for both a five-person outfit and a fifty-person one, and printing one means choosing which of them to be wrong about. Vendors that price on the shape of a business tend not to publish, for the same reason a builder does not print a price for "an extension".

None of which makes a quoted price good for you by itself. It makes it a different kind of thing, with different questions attached, which is what the rest of this page is about. The models themselves, and where the rest of the money goes, are set out in what trade and construction software costs.

Where a quoted price goes wrong

Quoting has real failure modes, and they are worth knowing before you ask any vendor for a figure.

• It can price the customer instead of the work. If the figure moves according to what the vendor believes you can afford, that is not sizing. It is a guess at your budget, and you have no way of seeing it happen.
• It costs you time. A rate card is read in a minute. A quote takes a call, sometimes several, and that time is real even when the number turns out to be reasonable.
• It makes comparison harder. Two quotes built on different assumptions cannot be laid side by side, and the work of making them comparable lands on you rather than on either vendor.
• It can simply be commercial cover. Keeping a number out of a competitor's hands is a benefit to the vendor. It is worth nothing at all to you.

None of that argues for a rate card. It argues for refusing to let a quote behave like a conversation, and insisting it behaves like a price.

How to make a quote behave like a price

Six questions. Ask them of every vendor who will not publish a figure, this one included.

1. What specifically moves this number? Ask for the variables, not the total.
2. Is any part of it charged per person, and what happens to the figure if we put site on it as well as the office?
3. What is fixed, and for how long?
4. What would trigger a re-quote: headcount, a new module, a new project, a good year?
5. What is the renewal price, and who decides it?
6. Will you put all of that in writing before we commit to anything?

The last one is the whole test. Everything above it can be answered warmly on a call and remembered differently later.

A number given on a call and never written down is not a price. It is an opening position.

Why this matters most at the smaller end

The argument for a per-firm price is strongest for the firms a rate card treats worst. A five-person outfit that wants timesheets and nothing else is precisely the buyer priced out by a figure built for a fifty-person one. Quoted properly, the figure is sized to a five-person firm, and the fact that the same platform could run a business twenty times their size costs them nothing.

That direction of travel matters. Replacing a spreadsheet for a small firm is not a lesser version of the work, and a pricing model that treats it as an afterthought tends to produce software that does the same.

Where to start, on Monday

Write down four numbers before you speak to anybody. How many people would use it if access were free. How many projects run at once. How many parts of the job you would genuinely run on it in the first six months. What you are paying now across everything it would replace, including the subscriptions nobody has cancelled.

Those four turn a quote conversation into a specification, which is a much harder thing to be talked out of. Then put the six questions above to every vendor on the list and write the answers down as they are given. Vendors sound similar on a call and read very differently on paper.