If You Need a Quote, You’re Already Paying Too Much: An Investigation into HR Software Pricing

TL;DR: Too many HR and performance vendors hide prices behind forms, impose minimum annual spends, and split essential features into paid “modules.” That might have made sense a decade ago. In 2025, with AI lowering the marginal cost of reviews, feedback, goals, and analytics, this model survives mostly because buyers tolerate it. If your team can’t see a price and estimate total cost of ownership (TCO) without a meeting, you’re not a customer—you’re a target.

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What we looked at (and why it matters)

We examined public pricing pages and FAQs from widely used HR/performance platforms and cross-checked where vendors publish specifics. Our goal wasn’t to “name and shame,” but to show patterns that make budgeting hard and adoption slower for small and midsize businesses (SMBs).

Across the market, three practices appear again and again:

1. Minimum annual spends that act like a floor—no matter how small your team is.

2. Module sprawl that carves table-stakes features into add-ons and tiers.

3. Quote-only pages that make apples-to-apples comparisons nearly impossible before a sales call.

Finding 1: Minimums and lock-ins

A minimum annual spend can be rationalized as a way for vendors to cover onboarding, support, and success resources. The problem is that a hard floor discourages the “crawl, walk, run” adoption pattern SMBs need. If you want to start with one department, a $4k floor is already a commitment conversation with Finance. If the price is USD-only, currency swings become another budgeting wrinkle for non-US teams.

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Finding 2: Module sprawl and feature gating

When reviews, goals/OKRs, 1:1s, recognition, and analytics live across separate modules or tiers, two costs appear: (a) time-to-value slows because not everyone gets the same toolkit on day one, and (b) TCO rises as you bolt on capabilities you assumed were included.

One mainstream vendor, for instance, publishes three annual plans that map capabilities across tiers; it’s transparent, but it means your “apples-to-apples” evaluation must price the whole use case, not the entry plan.

Finding 3: Quote-only prices

Quote-only pricing is common in enterprise software; it allows bundling and volume discounts. The catch for SMBs: it prevents benchmarking before a call and often hides how contract length and module choices change the number. One performance platform explicitly says “Contact sales for a customized quote” and notes that all contracts have a minimum 1-year term.

Why “Get a Quote” and “Module Pricing” Make No Sense in 2025

Here’s the reality: in 2012, HR tech was still on-premise or clunky cloud. Vendors could justify separate “modules” because each capability meant separate servers, configurations, and sometimes even separate products.

But it’s 2025. Reviews, feedback, OKRs, analytics, recognition, and coaching are all just cloud forms and workflows running on cheap compute and storage. Generating a performance review cycle or an AI-driven feedback draft is compute + storage + AI inference—and the incremental cost is close to zero.

Cloud infrastructure costs have dropped year after year. AI APIs and vector databases have made automation cheaper, not more expensive. Yet HR vendors still price like it’s 2012: slicing features into modules, forcing annuals, and hiding behind quotes. It’s as if your email provider charged “extra” for the Reply All button.

For enterprises, this makes no sense—because the marginal cost to the vendor is negligible. For SMBs, it’s even worse—because the financial burden of modules and minimums is proportionally larger.

So why hasn’t pricing caught up? One possibility: Google and other search algorithms keep directing traffic to the incumbents, whose content is optimized but whose pricing models are outdated. That creates a feedback loop: HR leaders researching options end up at the same opaque, quote-driven vendors, not the transparent ones.

 Schedule an EvalFlow Demo to see what transparent, AI-native pricing looks like.

The 2025 Buyer’s Checklist

If you’re evaluating HR software this year, ask vendors for:

✅ Public, screenshot-able pricing (or a plain-text quote with line items).
✅ Exact minimums and contract terms before you sign.
✅ One price for the whole use case—reviews, OKRs, feedback, recognition, analytics.
✅ Itemized fees like SSO or migration.
✅ Exit and portability rights—data exports, renewal caps, termination clauses.

The bottom line

In 2025, “Get a Quote” and “Pick Your Modules” are relics of a different era. If vendors still price like it’s 2012, it’s not because of cost—it’s because the market hasn’t forced them to change. And perhaps, because the search engines we rely on to find solutions still point us to outdated solutions and pricing models.

It’s time to demand better. Transparent, inclusive, predictable pricing isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It’s table stakes.

 Schedule an EvalFlow Demo — see why pricing transparency matters.