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. 83 figures across 82 vendors.

This article is about the ones with no number.

The count, disaggregated

26 of 83 figures (31%) have no usable published monthly USD price. But that headline is too blunt to be useful, because those 26 are not all the same thing. Broken down:

(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: 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 sixteen, 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 — "Talk to us" since our 11 Aug 2026 re-read; a free tier remains) · FaceUp · Glofox · Inventory Planner (by Sage) · Limble · Mindbody (publishes a floor, hides the tiers) · Osano · Packgine · Podium · Procurify · ProvePrivacy · Salsify (PIM) · Veryfi Restaurant Menu OCR

(All verified between 5 and 22 July 2026. 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 patterns inside the sixteen

The floor-without-the-ladder. Mindbody publishes "Starting at 99 Euro/month per location" and nothing else. 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. Avalara left the fully-gated list in this direction on our 11 August 2026 re-read: its page now shows "Plans start at $699 per state, per year" — a floor, still no ladder.

The disclosed-but-unmeasured minimum. Cheqroom — which does publish a per-admin price of "184 Per admin/month" — adds "Minimum administrator counts apply" without saying how many. The price is public and still uncomputable.

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 2026-07-05: 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.
• Whistlelink — quoted elsewhere as "$49 to $199/month." Its own page, read 2026-07-05, is in euros: EUR 79/month for the 0–49 employee tier.

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 2026-08-01, 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.

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 — all 82 vendors, quoted verbatim from their own pages 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
• 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

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.