What does grant management software cost? How the costs add up
The first question from a foundation shopping for grant management software is almost always the same: what does it cost? A straight answer is surprisingly hard to get, because most vendors only reveal their price in a quotation. This article breaks down what a grant management system typically costs. It also states AAPU’s prices in numbers, because we publish them on our pricing page anyway.
What are the components of grant software pricing?
Almost every system is priced in three parts:
- Setup or onboarding fee. One-off work: configuring the system, building the forms, training users and possibly migrating data from the old system.
- Ongoing maintenance. A monthly or annual fee covering servers, security updates, backups and support.
- Usage-based fees. Per-item charges for things like electronic signatures, text messages or additional users.
The total cost only becomes clear once all three are known. A cheap-looking monthly fee can turn expensive if every additional feature is billed separately.
What hidden costs do grant systems have?
When comparing quotations, ask at least about these:
- User licences. Is every reviewer or committee member billed separately? For a foundation with ten reviewers, per-user pricing multiplies the cost.
- Number of calls. Are the spring and autumn rounds two separately billed calls?
- Signature and identification fees. Electronic signatures and strong authentication are often third-party services whose per-item prices are passed on to the customer, at cost or marked up.
- Integration surcharges. Exporting payment data to financial administration, or automating Mela notifications, may be a module at extra cost.
- Change requests. What does it cost to add a new field to the application form? If every change is billable work, costs grow year after year.
An example: AAPU’s pricing in numbers
We use our own pricing as the example because it is public:
- Setup fee €1,500. Includes onboarding, building the foundation’s own forms, and training.
- Annual fee €2,999. Includes 100 electronically signed forms, all users, an unlimited number of calls, updates and support.
- Additional forms €2 each. Beyond the first hundred. The only per-item fee, and no other usage is billed separately.
The first year therefore costs €1,500 + €2,999 = €4,499 if the foundation stays within a hundred forms. If it signs, say, 150 documents electronically per year, the 50 forms above the limit add €100. In subsequent years the cost is the annual fee plus any additional forms, around €3,000 to €3,100 a year.
We do not claim to know other vendors’ prices, and we do not compare them here. Instead, we recommend asking every vendor for a breakdown using exactly the structure above. That makes quotations comparable.
How much does manual work cost if you don’t buy a system?
The alternative to a system is not zero euros. It is manual work. If the administrator’s and committee’s time goes into collecting applications, sending reminders, building summary spreadsheets and filing notifications for, say, two working weeks a year, the cost runs to thousands of euros. Add the data protection risks of an email-based process on top.
Compare the price of a system with the true cost of the current process, not with zero.
How do you work out the cost for your foundation?
AAPU’s price does not depend on the foundation’s size or number of users, so you can run the numbers directly from the pricing page. If you would like to see what the setup fee concretely covers, book a free demo and we will go through the onboarding scope point by point.