The Contract You Forgot to Cancel — Self-Hosted Renewal Tracking, Bought Once

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, re-read 3 September 2026 — all six figures unchanged), 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. At the 3 September re-read the page named those tiers Essentials, Business and Enterprise, and attached two conditions to every one of them: each figure is "/per month (paid annually)", and each tier "Includes 5 users" — so the entry price is a year's commitment bought up front, and the per-user charges below start at your sixth person, not your second. A third re-read on 5 September 2026 returned all six figures, both conditions and all three tier names unchanged.

Read the three surcharges in order, though, because they run the wrong way. An extra person costs $49 on the $499 tier, $69 on the $899 tier and $89 on the $1,299 tier (read 5 September 2026) — the more you are already paying, the more each additional head costs. Ten people on Enterprise is therefore $1,299 plus five at $89: $1,744 a month, $20,928 a year. And the top tier ends with "Volume discounts available. Let's talk." — so even the one vendor in this category that publishes a price stops publishing at the point where the money gets serious.

ContractWorks — from contractworks.com/pricing (read 2026-07-21): no public price. The ledger entry recorded it plainly: "the pricing page displays no plan prices." On our 11 August 2026 re-read the pricing page itself had been withdrawn, and on 3 September 2026 the address returned a flat 404. It returned 404 again on 5 September 2026.

That 404 is not a dead company, which makes it more interesting. The site is live and trading: the homepage reads "Take Control of Every Contract" and now identifies the product as "ContractWorks: An Onit Product", with "© 2026 Onit Inc." in the footer (read 5 September 2026). The company was acquired; the pricing page was not carried across. And the homepage still links to one — an anchor in its "Why ContractWorks?" section points at /contract-management-software-pricing, which also returns 404 (both checked 5 September 2026). A vendor in the contract-management business is linking to a pricing page it has deleted.

Gatekeeper — from gatekeeperhq.com/pricing (read 2026-08-01, re-read 3 September 2026 — still no amount anywhere): 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."

What the page does publish is the meter, and that is worth reading closely (read 5 September 2026). Contracts, users, eSign licenses and Gatekeeper Agents are Unlimited on all three tiers. The one count that moves is Third Party Quota — "Up to 250" on PRO, "Up to 750" on ENTERPRISE, and ">750" on ENTERPRISE PLUS — alongside AI workflow allowances of 2, 2 and >2 best-practice workflows and 1, 2 and >2 custom ones.

So the tier boundary is not your contract count and not your headcount. It is how many third parties you deal with — and the page will tell you precisely where the line sits at 250 suppliers, while declining to say what stepping over it costs. Knowing exactly which side of a threshold you fall on, and nothing about the price of either side, is a strange thing to be told by a company selling visibility into commitments.

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 rumor 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:

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:

1. A list of every supplier and contract, with values and dates.
2. A warning before each one renews or expires.
3. Drafting and negotiation inside the tool.
4. E-signature.
5. 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.

Try the Supplia demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.

From its product page (read 2026-08-20): $69.00, one time. It is also one of the four products in the Back-Office Suite, beside invoicing, purchase approvals and permit tracking.

Against Concord's entry tier, the license costs less than four days of the subscription.

What it does and 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?" — "Yes — the signed contract uploads onto its own record (type decided by the file's bytes, 10 MB cap, served only through a permission-checked route), so the alert about a renewal and the document it concerns live together."

"Does it pay suppliers or process invoices?" — "No — it records suppliers, contract values and dates, and shows each renewal, notice deadline and expiry on the dashboard, the renewal radar and your calendar feed. It moves no money and has zero payment surface."

(Source: ownware.io/p/supplia, as the page reads on 2026-09-24. An earlier version of this guide quoted a link-only design; Supplia has stored the signed document since 3.x, and the quotes above are the current ones.)

Read the second one again, because it is the design decision. Supplia holds a row that says this contract exists, it is worth this much, it renews on this date — and, if you upload it, the signed PDF itself, on your own server and shown only to signed-in staff. It collects no signatures and moves no money.

That is a smaller product than a CLM, and it is smaller on purpose. If you upload the executed agreements, they sit on the server you already secure; if you would rather keep them elsewhere, record a link instead.

And the warnings 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 on 10 August 2026 from the price API behind its web-hosting and cloud pricing pages — 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 $69, 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 license options
• Nineteen percent of business software will not show you a price — Gatekeeper and ContractWorks among them, and what quote-gating costs a small buyer
• The Back-Office Suite — the supplier register beside invoicing, approvals and permits, bought once
• The SaaS Price Observatory — every tracked vendor priced from its own page, 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.