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. Construction management software 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.

The six things that move the number

When a price is quoted rather than listed, these are the variables doing the work. Knowing them is what lets you sanity-check a quote instead of taking it on trust.

1. How many people touch it. Not how many licences you intend to buy. How many people would be in the system if access cost nothing, which is usually everybody from the yard to the boardroom.
2. How many projects run at once. Four long jobs and forty short ones make very different demands on the same software, and on whoever has to support it.
3. Whether you use subcontractors at all. A firm running direct labour only never opens the subcontractor ledger, the verification process or the payment side that sits behind it. That is a whole section of the platform switched off, and it should not be in the bill.
4. 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.
5. How many modules you turn on. More than thirty exist. Almost nobody wants all of them, and the ones left switched off are the clearest thing a price can be sized against.
6. 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.

Notice that only the first of those is headcount, and even that one is about people rather than 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.

The honest case against pricing this way

Quoting has real failure modes. We use this model, so it is worth being straight about them rather than leaving you to find them.

• 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, they pay for five people and one module, 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 modules you would genuinely switch on 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.