The Contract You Forgot to Cancel — Self-Hosted Renewal Tracking, Bought Once
Two of the three leading contract tools will not publish a price at all. The third starts at $499 a month. Here is what renewal tracking actually needs, priced from each vendor's own page and dated.
The expensive contract is not the one you negotiated badly. It is the one that renewed on 1 April because nobody had the date.
Every business past about twenty suppliers has this problem, and almost every business solves it the same way: a spreadsheet, a calendar reminder somebody set once, and the quiet assumption that finance is watching. Then a three-year auto-renewal fires on a tool nobody has opened since 2024, and the answer to "who owned that?" is nobody.
The software category that exists to fix this is called contract lifecycle management. This article is about what it costs — and about the more interesting problem, which is that most of it will not tell you.
Two of the three leading vendors will not publish a price
We read three vendors' own pricing pages. Here is what each one shows.
Concord — the only one of the three that publishes figures. From concord.app/pricing (read 2026-07-21), quoted verbatim:
"$499 /per month — Additional users $49/mo … $899 — $69/mo … $1,299 — $89/mo"
So: three tiers at $499, $899 and $1,299 per month, with additional users charged $49, $69 and $89 per user per month on top.
ContractWorks — from contractworks.com/pricing (read 2026-07-21): no public price. The ledger entry records it plainly: "the pricing page displays no plan prices."
Gatekeeper — from gatekeeperhq.com/pricing (read 2026-08-01): no public price. The page lists three tiers — PRO, ENTERPRISE and ENTERPRISE PLUS — with their features, and no amounts anywhere. What it offers instead is a button:
"Arrange a demonstration of Gatekeeper, tailored to your specific business and use case."
Two of three. In a category whose entire purpose is helping you keep track of what you are committed to paying.
We are not going to repeat the figures that third-party comparison blogs publish for these two vendors. We checked one of them — a widely-cited "roughly $1,125/month" for Gatekeeper — against the vendor's own page, and the vendor's own page contains no such number. A price that only exists on somebody else's website is not a price. It is a rumour with a currency symbol.
What the $499 actually buys, and what it does not
Concord's entry tier is a full contract lifecycle platform: authoring, negotiation, e-signature, approvals, a repository, reporting. If your legal team drafts and redlines contracts inside the tool, that is what you are paying for and it is a reasonable thing to pay for.
But run the arithmetic on the entry tier alone:
| Concord entry tier | |
|---|---|
| Per month | $499 |
| 12 months | $5,988 |
| 36 months | $17,964 |
| With five additional users at $49 | $744/month → $26,784 over three years |
That is the price of the platform, not the price of the problem. The problem — what have we signed, with whom, for how much, and when does it renew — is a register and a reminder.
The honest question to ask before buying anything
Write down which of these you actually need:
- A list of every supplier and contract, with values and dates.
- A warning before each one renews or expires.
- Drafting and negotiation inside the tool.
- E-signature.
- Obligation tracking, risk scoring, spend analytics, vendor performance.
If you need 3, 4 and 5, buy a CLM. Concord publishes a price; the others will quote you one. That is the correct outcome and nothing below applies to you.
If you need 1 and 2 — and most businesses under a few hundred staff need only 1 and 2 — you are being sold a platform to solve a filing problem.
What a register-and-reminder costs
Supplia is a self-hosted supplier and contract register — PHP and MySQL, installed on your own hosting, bought once.
From its product page (read 2026-08-01): $59.00, one time.
| 3-year cost | |
|---|---|
| Concord entry tier | $17,964 |
| Concord entry + 5 users | $26,784 |
| ContractWorks | unpublished |
| Gatekeeper | unpublished |
| Supplia | $59 + your hosting |
Against Concord's entry tier, the licence costs less than four days of the subscription.
What it deliberately does not do — quoted from its own FAQ
This matters more than the price, and we are quoting rather than paraphrasing:
"Does Supplia store my contract documents?" — "No — a contract's document is recorded as a reference or a link, never an uploaded file. That keeps it a pure register with no file-serving surface to secure."
"Does it pay suppliers or process invoices?" — "No — it records suppliers, contract values, and dates, and reminds you before they renew or expire. It moves no money and has zero payment surface."
(Source: ownware.io/p/supplia, read 2026-08-01.)
Read the first one again, because it is the whole design decision. Supplia does not hold your contracts. It holds a row that says this contract exists, it is worth this much, it renews on this date, and here is where the PDF lives.
That is a smaller product than a CLM, and it is smaller on purpose. It also means the thing you would most fear losing in a breach — the executed agreements themselves — is not in it.
And the alerts are specified rather than promised:
"By exact date math in PHP, DST-safe, comparing each contract's renewal and end dates to today across configurable 60/30/7-day windows — nothing is cached to go stale."
The honest costs of self-hosting
Hosting. Plain PHP and MySQL — "SQLite for a zero-config trial, MySQL/MariaDB for production on ordinary shared hosting" per the product page. If you already run a website, the marginal cost is often zero. If you do not, price it from an actual provider. For a concrete number from a named provider: Hetzner's own pricing — machine-read from the price API behind their pricing pages on 10 Aug 2026 — lists web-hosting plans from €1.60 to €16.72 a month and entry cloud servers from €3.99 a month (prices as returned for their German datacenters; confirm current pricing and VAT treatment at checkout). Any comparable host works — the point is that the "own" side of this comparison costs single-digit euros a month.
Your time, at install. An hour the first time.
Your time, forever. Backups, PHP updates, and the server being your problem at 2am.
And one that is specific to this category and genuinely uncomfortable: a renewal alert is only useful if it arrives. If your server is down for the week that contains the 30-day warning on a five-figure auto-renewal, the tool has failed at the only job you bought it for.
A hosted vendor has an operations team whose entire purpose is that email going out. You will not. Mitigate it — monitor the cron, send yourself a weekly digest so silence is itself a signal — but do not pretend the risk is zero, because it is not.
Where the CLM vendors are genuinely better
- They hold the documents. One system of record for the agreement and its metadata, with access control and an audit trail. A register plus a shared drive is two places to keep in sync, and they will drift.
- They do the negotiation. Redlining, version history, counterparty collaboration. A register does none of it.
- They are somebody else's uptime problem — see the paragraph above.
- Obligation and risk tracking is real work. If you are managing supplier risk for compliance reasons rather than budget reasons, a register is not enough and you should say so out loud in your requirements.
The switch path
1. Try the demo. The Supplia demo opens already signed in on sample data with no sign-up, and resets itself. Fifteen minutes will tell you whether a register is what you actually wanted.
2. Do the census first — before any software. List every supplier, every contract value, every renewal and end date. This is the real work, and it is the part that pays for itself whatever tool you choose. Most businesses discover two or three live contracts nobody remembered during this step.
3. Install on hosting you already have.
4. Load the census and set the alert windows. Then verify a warning actually reaches your inbox — send a test with a date that fires today.
5. Put the PDFs somewhere durable and link to them. Supplia stores a reference, not a file. Decide where the file lives before you need it, not after.
The short version
If you need drafting, redlining and e-signature in one system, buy a CLM — and note that only one of the three leading vendors will tell you what it costs without a sales call.
If what you need is a list and a warning, the entry price of the published option is $17,964 over three years, and the two unpublished options begin with a demo booking.
The alternative is a register you install once for $59, that holds no documents, moves no money, and emails you at 60, 30 and 7 days.
And whichever you choose, do step 2 first. The census is the part that finds the contract you forgot to cancel.
Next steps
- Open the live Supplia demo — no sign-up, already signed in, resets itself
- Supplia product page and licence options
- The SaaS Price Observatory — 82 vendors priced from their own pages, with the quote-gated ones recorded as quote-gated
Every price here is quoted from the vendor's own published pricing page with the date it was read. Where a vendor publishes no price, that fact is the record — we do not fill the gap with a figure from somewhere else.