Nineteen Percent of Business Software Will Not Show You a Price — We Counted

We keep a public ledger of what business software costs, transcribed from each vendor's own pricing page with the date it was read. It now holds 152 vendors, recounted from the ledger itself on 6 September 2026 — nearly double the 83 figures this article was first written against.

That recount is the reason to trust the headline rather than the reason to doubt it. When we first published, 16 of 83 vendors showed no price: 19%. Having roughly doubled the sample, the count is 28 of 152 — 18.4%. On 5 September the same count against 151 vendors read 18.5%, and this article is titled for the nineteen it rounded to then. One vendor added on 6 September (Singenuity, which publishes a 4% booking fee and so is priced, not gated) moved the denominator and not the numerator, and the share now rounds to eighteen. The honest way to state it is that between a sixth and a fifth of business software will not show you a price, and that the ratio has held there while the ledger nearly doubled — the stability is the finding, not the second decimal place. A single tally can be an accident of which vendors we happened to track. A proportion that survives the sample doubling is a description of the market.

This article is about the ones with no number.

The count, disaggregated

48 of 152 vendors — 32% — have no usable published monthly USD price (recounted 7 September 2026; it was 31% when the ledger held 83 figures, and 31% again at 152 until Cheqroom moved into this count — see the last row of the table). That headline is still too blunt to be useful, because they are not one thing. Broken down:

There is a third state this census does not have a column for, and by 5 September 2026 we had met it five times: the vendor that publishes its entry rung and hides the rest. Precoro prints "starts at $499" with its user tiers unpublished; Cheqroom prints a starting price per admin with an unstated minimum; QuotaPath publishes Growth and Premium and quotes Strategic; Sign In App publishes three tiers and quotes Executive; LoyaltyLion publishes Classic and marks Advanced and Plus "Custom". All five sit in the priced column above, because they do publish a number — and all five will still send you to a sales call before you can total your own bill. Counting them as "priced" is defensible and slightly flattering; we would rather say so than quietly widen the definition.

The second row is the one we had been folding into the wrong bucket. Nine of these vendors publish a perfectly clear price; it simply is not in dollars, and a ledger kept in USD had been treating "priced in sterling" as though it were the same condition as "will not tell you". It is not, and separating them is what took the free-and-freemium count from six down to three.

(A fifth bucket used to sit here: "published but unreadable," containing exactly Bill.com, whose AP/AR plan prices would not render on its own pricing page. It resolved on our 11 August 2026 re-read of its pricing page: Essentials $49/user/month, Team $65, Corporate $89 — so the bucket is gone and Bill.com is simply priced per user now.)

So the honest number is 19%, not a third. We are correcting our own framing here because the looser version would have been more dramatic and less true — six of those vendors are free, which is the opposite of hiding the price.

The twenty-eight, by name

Every one of these was read directly from the vendor's own pricing page. In each case the page showed no price:

AppFolio · Asset Panda · ContractWorks · Docsumo (withdrew its published $499 Starter; both paid tiers read "Talk to us" on 5 September 2026, and a free tier of 1,000 pages remains) · FMX · FaceUp · Facilio · Fleet Complete · Glofox · Hippo CMMS (Eptura) · Inventory Planner (by Sage) · Juro · Limble · Mariana Tek · Mindbody · Osano · Packgine · PermitFlow · Procurify · ProvePrivacy · Qtrac (now Frontlion) · Salsify (PIM) · Samsara · Square Loyalty · Veryfi Restaurant Menu OCR · Visdum · Whip Around (withdrew its pricing page: the address redirects to the homepage, which shows no price, 26 September 2026) · eMaint

(List regenerated from the ledger itself on 5 September 2026 rather than maintained by hand, so it cannot drift from the data behind it; each name links to the page as recorded. Gatekeeper joins this list — we read its pricing page on 1 August 2026 and found three tiers named PRO, ENTERPRISE and ENTERPRISE PLUS with features listed and no amounts anywhere, offering instead: "Arrange a demonstration of Gatekeeper, tailored to your specific business and use case.")

Two vendors changed places on 26 September 2026, and the count did not move. Podium now publishes Core at $399 a month and Pro at $599, so it left this list; Whip Around withdrew its pricing page, so it joined. One counting rule, stated because it now decides a case: a vendor that shows a price to one region and refuses another counts as gated here. AppFolio's own page data lists per-unit rates for US visitors (Core $1.49 per unit a month, with a 50-unit minimum), while a European visitor sees only "Get a Quote" — so AppFolio stays on the list.

Two patterns inside the twenty-eight

The floor-without-the-ladder. AppFolio publishes no price but does publish a threshold: "Minimum spend and 50 unit minimum apply. Contact us for details." You learn enough to disqualify yourself, and not enough to budget — the 50-unit minimum is what that costs a small landlord. Avalara left the fully-gated list in this direction and is still there on our 5 September 2026 re-read: "Plans start at $699 per state, per year" — a floor, still no ladder.

Mindbody flickers, and that is its own finding. This article cited it as the floor-without-a-ladder case, on "Starting at €99 Euro/month per location", read on 3 September 2026. On 5 September that floor was gone: three tiers — Starter, Accelerate and Ultimate — with "Let's talk" beneath each and no number anywhere. On 7 September the same line was back above the same three quote-gated tiers. Three reads in five days, three different answers to "what does it cost", from one address on one page. We will not tell you which of those is the real Mindbody, because we do not know. What we can tell you is that the floor is the only number the vendor has ever published, that it has never been attached to a tier you can buy, and that a figure which can vanish for two days is not one to budget from. The movement in this category runs both ways: Bill.com became readable, Cheqroom became readable, and Mindbody cannot decide.

The disclosed-but-unmeasured minimum. Cheqroom publishes a full ladder — Core $184, Business $275 and Enterprise $367 per admin per month billed annually, with an E.L.A. tier quoted (read 5 September 2026, the first clean read we have had of this page) — and attaches "Minimum administrator counts apply" to every one of them without saying how many. *A second qualifier sits underneath: "The prices displayed are starting prices per admin, per workspace." So the figure is a starting price, for an unstated minimum number of admins, per workspace. Every number on that page is public, and you still cannot multiply your way to a bill.*

What quote-gating actually costs a small buyer

Not money, at first. Three other things:

1. Time, asymmetrically. A demo call is thirty to sixty minutes plus scheduling, per vendor. Comparing four quote-gated products is most of a working day before you have a single number. A published price costs the buyer four minutes.

2. Leverage. A price discovered in a sales conversation is a price set with knowledge of you — your size, your urgency, whether you mentioned a competitor. A published price is the same for everyone and cannot be adjusted upward because you sounded keen.

3. The comparison itself. You cannot shortlist what you cannot price. In practice quote-gating removes a vendor from the "roughly what does this cost" stage entirely — which is a real cost to the vendor too, and presumably one they have decided is worth paying.

None of this is an accusation. Enterprise software is genuinely configured per customer, and a published price for a product that varies by seats, modules, volume and support tier can mislead more than it informs. Quote-gating is a legitimate model. It is simply a model that trades your time for their flexibility, and it is worth noticing that the trade is being made.

The thing that happens when nobody publishes a price

Somebody else publishes one anyway — and it is often wrong.

While researching this ledger we hit three cases where a widely-syndicated comparison site published specific figures for vendors whose own pages contain no such number:

• Osano — a third-party article stated a "Plus plan at USD 199/month." Osano's own pricing page, read 2026-09-03: no numeric prices at all, "Schedule a demo."
• Gatekeeper — a third-party figure of "roughly $1,125/month" circulates. Gatekeeper's own page, read 2026-08-01: no amounts. The contract you forgot to cancel is the category at length.
• Whistlelink — quoted elsewhere as "$49 to $199/month." Its own page, re-read 5 September 2026, is in euros and runs by employee band: €79 for 0–49, €99 for 50–149, €149 for 150–249, €199 for 250–499, €299 for 500–999. The third-party range is wrong in its currency and its shape — and note that the €79 band covers organizations the Whistleblowing Directive does not oblige to run a channel at all, so it is the least relevant figure on the page to quote.

And one worse case, where the vendor does publish clearly and the third party still got it wrong: a comparison article gives ConsignCloud as "$129 Starter / $229 Pro / $349 Enterprise." ConsignCloud's own page, read 2026-09-03, shows Basic $139/month, Pro $189/month per location, Enterprise custom. Three tiers, three wrong numbers, three wrong names — for a vendor that hides nothing — the consignment article tells that story in full.

That is the practical lesson of this entire article: whatever a comparison site tells you a product costs — including this one — open the vendor's own pricing page before you budget from it. The difference between sources is not honesty; it is that some of them link and date what they read.

What to do about it

If a vendor will not publish a price:

• Ask for the number in your first email, before the demo. "Before we book time, what does this cost for X users / Y units / Z volume?" A vendor who will not answer that in writing is telling you something.
• Ask about minimums explicitly — spend minimums, seat minimums, unit minimums. They are the most commonly omitted term and the one most likely to disqualify a small buyer.
• Ask what happens at renewal. A first-year price negotiated down is not a price.
• Time-box it. If two vendors publish and two do not, price the two that do first — you may find you are done.

The short version

16 of 82 tracked vendors — 19% — publish no price at all, and one more — Avalara — publishes a floor while hiding the ladder. Another publishes a per-admin rate alongside an unquantified minimum, which is public and still uncomputable.

The cost to you is a day of demos, a weaker negotiating position, and a shortlist you cannot assemble.

And the second-order cost is that the gap gets filled by third parties who are frequently wrong — we found four such cases while compiling this, including one where the vendor publishes everything clearly and the comparison site still got all three tiers wrong.

Open the vendor's page. It takes four minutes and it is the only source that is authoritative.

Next steps

• The SaaS Price Observatory — every tracked vendor, quoted verbatim from its own page with verification dates, and quote-gated vendors recorded as quote-gated
• The full dataset is public and machine-readable at https://ownware.io/observatory.json (CC BY 4.0) — check our counts
• Self-hosted alternatives by category — where every comparison renders only cited competitor data
• The minimum spend — the floors that sit under the prices that are published
• Our own answer to the practice: every price on this store is public — Confida, at $119 one-time, sits in a category whose incumbent is quote-gated, and its number is on the page

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

Counts in this article were computed from the published dataset on 1 August 2026, with the 11 August 2026 re-verification applied: Avalara out of the gated list (it now publishes a floor), Docsumo in (it withdrew its price), Bill.com resolved — the totals happen to be unchanged. If a vendor has begun publishing a price since the verification date shown, their page is authoritative and our row is out of date — which is why every row carries a date.