Licence or subscription
The line everyone negotiates. It varies by perhaps 20% between comparable quotes after discounting, and it is the line vendors are least willing to move on beyond a standard band.
Buyer guide
Not one major mid-market ERP vendor publishes list pricing. That is a category norm rather than an accident, and it means most buyers negotiate without knowing where their quote sits in the distribution. This guide is built from 63 real quotes.
Send it with your requirements. We will tell you where it sits and which lines are soft.
Buyer guide
Vendor proposals typically show two of these. The other three are where budgets are missed.
The line everyone negotiates. It varies by perhaps 20% between comparable quotes after discounting, and it is the line vendors are least willing to move on beyond a standard band.
Median 1.4× first-year licence across our sample, with more than 2× variance for the same scope. This is where the money and the risk actually are.
Appears in about half the quotes we see, and where it appears it is usually scoped for two systems when the buyer runs eight. That gap surfaces in month four.
400 to 1,200 hours depending on entity count and data condition. At loaded cost that is $40,000 to $150,000, and it appears in no vendor proposal we have ever seen.
Seat growth, module additions, and annual uplift mean year three commonly runs 30 to 50% above year one for the same business. Quotes are built around year one.
Most buyers spend their effort on licence. Implementation is quoted by a partner with far more discretion and considerably more variance, and it is a larger number.
The three questions that move an implementation quote in our experience: what was your median variance to original quote last year, what happens if we exceed the estimated hours, and will you name the specific people assigned. Partners who answer all three tend to be the ones worth working with, and the answers themselves change the price.
The same configuration quoted in month one of a quarter and in week twelve differs materially. This is well known and still under-exploited by mid-market buyers, largely because internal approval cycles are not planned around it.
A vendor cannot invoice for your team’s time, so including it makes their number look worse against a competitor who omits it. Every proposal therefore compares licence to licence, and the largest cost on both sides stays invisible.
Estimate it yourself: 400 hours for a light single-entity implementation with clean data, up to 1,200 for multi-entity with data problems. It is the weakest figure in our study — only eleven of sixty-three companies tracked it — and it is still better than omitting it.
We publish ours, which is unusual here and partly a positioning decision. Our implementation multiple is roughly 0.25× year-one subscription against a market median of 1.4×.
The honest reason is that we do less: no partner margin, a narrower product, and an integration-first approach that defers the migration. A NetSuite implementation covers more ground than ours does. The number worth comparing is three-year total cost against what you actually need, which is what the calculator is for.
These 63 quotes were shown to us by prospects and customers, usually by buyers who thought the number was high. That skews the sample and we state it rather than correcting for it, because we cannot correct for it honestly. Treat the medians as an upper-middle estimate.
Questions
We will tell you where it sits against comparable deals and which lines have room in them.