Ask what a business system costs and you will get the same answer everywhere: book a call. That is not because the number is complicated. It is because the number is easier to defend once somebody has spent forty minutes being sold to.
So here is the honest version, without the call.
Why “call for a quote” exists
There are two reasons a supplier hides the price, and only one of them is legitimate.
The legitimate one is that the work genuinely varies. If every project is built from scratch, the price really does depend on what you ask for, and quoting blind would be guessing.
The other reason is that the price varies by customer. If the salesperson can find out your revenue, your headcount and how badly you need this before naming a figure, the figure can be adjusted accordingly. That is a business model, and it is why so much of this market feels like buying a car.
You can usually tell which one you are dealing with. Ask for a price range on the first email. A supplier with a real structure will give you one.
Three ways to buy, three very different numbers
1. Custom software built for you
Someone writes a system from scratch, for your business, and you own it at the end.
In South Africa this realistically starts in the low hundreds of thousands for something genuinely useful, and runs past a million for anything an operation of thirty people would depend on day to day. Add three to nine months before you can use it. Add fifteen to twenty percent a year afterwards for maintenance, because software that nobody maintains stops working the day the operating system updates.
This is the right answer when your process is the thing you compete on, and nothing off the shelf can express it. That is rarer than people think. Most hire yards hire in fundamentally the same way as most other hire yards.
The real cost is not the invoice. It is the year. You commit a large amount of money to a specification written before anyone had used the thing, and you find out whether it fits at the end.
2. International software, licensed per user
The global platforms in this category are genuinely good products. Their pricing model is the problem for a South African operation.
Almost all of them charge per user per month, in dollars, commonly somewhere between 30 and 120 US dollars a head. Convert that at whatever the rand is doing this week, multiply by twenty people, and you are usually well past what the same operation would pay locally, before implementation. Worse, the bill grows every time you hire someone.
There are three quieter costs. Support runs on their timezone, not yours. The product is built around how the work is done in Texas or Manchester, so your terminology and your compliance paperwork have to bend to it. And the implementation partner is a separate company charging separately.
3. Licensing a system that already exists, locally
You pay a monthly fee to use software the supplier owns, runs and keeps improving, set up around how your business works. You do not own the code. Your data is still yours.
This is what we do, so treat the following as an interested party being specific rather than neutral. Our plans run from R3 500 a month for up to five people to R28 000 a month for up to fifty, with a once-off setup fee between R15 000 and R65 000, and they are all published on our pricing page. Every plan includes the whole system. The only thing that moves the price is how many of your own staff log in.
The trade-off is real and worth stating plainly: you are not getting software written from nothing for you, and you do not own it. What you get instead is a system in weeks rather than a year, at a monthly figure instead of a capital project, with the risk of a bad fit discovered in week two rather than month nine.
The four things that actually drive the price
Whichever route you take, these are what move the number:
How many people touch it. Not your total headcount. The number who log in to run the business. Field technicians on a phone count. Your customers looking at their own jobs should not, and if a supplier charges you for those, ask why.
How much history you are bringing. Five years of jobs in spreadsheets is a real piece of work to move across, check and reconcile. It is usually the largest single line in a setup fee, and it is worth paying for properly rather than discovering the numbers are wrong after go-live.
How many integrations you need. Accounting is normally straightforward. Telematics, weighbridges, access control and anything with a proprietary connection are not.
How different you actually are. Every owner believes their process is unique. Usually about eighty percent is standard for the industry and twenty percent genuinely is not. The twenty percent is what you are paying to configure. Be honest about which is which and you will spend less.
The question that matters more than the price
Not “what does it cost” but “what is the current situation costing”.
Add up the jobs completed and never invoiced last year. The hours somebody spends rebuilding the same report every month. The damage claim you could not defend because nobody photographed the machine going out. The client you lost because a query took two days.
For a lot of operations those four lines add up to more than a year of licence fees. That is the actual comparison, and you can do the arithmetic yourself before you speak to a single supplier.
What to ask any supplier
- What does it cost, in a range, before we meet?
- What exactly is in the setup fee, and what is billed separately later?
- What happens to the price when we hire ten more people?
- Who owns the data, and how do we get it out if we leave?
- What is the shortest contract you offer?
That last one is the most revealing. A supplier who needs a three year lock-in is telling you something about how confident they are that you will still want this in year two.
Our answers are all on the pricing page, and there is no call required to read them.