Why We Publish Our Pricing (and Why Most LIMS Vendors Don't)

Two weeks ago I wrote up what a LIMS actually costs, including our own prices. That post promised a follow-up on the obvious question: if putting a number on the website is so useful to the people evaluating software, why does almost nobody in this industry do it? And why do we?

This is that post. It’s an opinion piece, so I’ll say up front what the opinion is: the people who evaluate a LIMS for an engineering test lab are lab managers and engineers with a budget line to justify, not procurement teams with a quarter to run a sales process. A price on the website respects that. Everything below is the longer version.

First, credit where it’s due

It isn’t literally nobody. QBench publishes annual tiers on its pricing page. CloudLIMS publishes per-user rates that step down with user count, and its FreeLIMS offering is free outright. A few others put a “starting at” figure on review sites. They deserve credit for it, and I’d rather be accurate than dramatic.

But of the dozen or so vendors an engineering or materials lab would realistically shortlist, most have a request-pricing button where the number should be, and the enterprise platforms have no number at all, because for them the license was never the cost. The implementation is. I go through who’s who in the best-LIMS roundup, so I won’t repeat it here.

Some of the reasons for hiding prices are legitimate. Modular products genuinely have no single number. Enterprise implementations genuinely dwarf the license. I’m not writing this to dunk on anyone. I’m writing it because the trade-off lands differently for the labs we serve, and I think it’s worth explaining why.

Reason one: you can’t shortlist without an order of magnitude

Picture the person who usually finds us. A lab manager at a manufacturer, six technicians, thirty engineers who submit test requests, and a spreadsheet that has quietly become load-bearing. Before anything else happens, they need to know one thing: is this a five-thousand-dollar-a-year conversation or a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar one?

Everything downstream depends on the answer. Who has to approve it. Whether it’s an operating expense or a capital project. Whether it can happen this year or has to wait for the next budget cycle. Whether it’s worth their time to keep reading.

“Contact sales” sends that person into a thirty-minute discovery call to learn something a webpage could have told them in ten seconds. Multiply by every vendor on the list. One of our customers, a laboratory manager, described having “spent months evaluating the most popular LIMS software (8 in total)” before choosing. Eight discovery calls just to find out which conversations were worth having. We’d rather be the vendor whose price you already knew before you booked.

Reason two: an unpublished price is a price based on you

When the first number you see arrives in a sales call, it arrives after the salesperson has learned your company’s size, your industry, how urgent the problem sounds, and how well-funded you seemed on the phone. That isn’t a scandal. It’s how enterprise software has been sold for decades, and there are people who are very good at it.

But it means two labs with identical needs can pay very different amounts, and the difference goes to whoever negotiated harder, not whoever needed it more. We didn’t want to be in that business. A five-person lab in Ohio and a fifty-person lab inside a Fortune 500 company see the same two numbers on our pricing page: $300 a month for a lab seat, $45 for a requester seat. The only exception is stated on the same page. If you have hundreds of requesters, we’ll talk about volume.

Reason three: it keeps us honest about the product

One price, every feature. That sentence is a constraint on us, not just a promise to you.

If we sold a base platform plus modules, a weak scheduling module could hide behind an add-on fee and nobody would notice until year two. If we sold tiers, the audit trail and custom fields would have a way of drifting up into “Professional.” With one price, a feature that isn’t good enough to include isn’t good enough to ship. Every customer gets the AI assistant, the AutoScheduler, the Metrics dashboards, and every update, because there’s no other bucket to put them in.

The requester seat came out of the same thinking. The honest answer to “who counts as a user?” for an in-house lab is “everyone who submits a request,” and at $300 a head that would mean the lab connects nobody and goes back to email. So the reduced-rate seat exists because the pricing model had to bend to what the product is for. Most pricing works the other way around.

Reason four: it filters for fit, in both directions

Someone who sees $300 a seat and closes the tab, say a two-person lab that runs ten tests a year, was never going to be a happy customer, and we’d have spent a demo hour learning that together. No hard feelings. The number did its job.

Someone who reads the page and books a demo anyway already knows the shape of the deal. They arrive with seat counts and a real workflow instead of a question about budget, and we spend the hour on their lab instead of on the reveal.

What it costs us

I’d be lying if I said publishing was free.

We leave money on the table with large customers who would have paid more if we’d asked. Every competitor knows our numbers and can price against them. We gave up the classic anchor-high move, where the first quote is inflated so the discount feels like a win. And when we change prices, it happens on a public webpage rather than in a quiet renewal letter, which means we have to be able to explain it.

We think all four are worth it. The last one especially. A price change you have to explain in public is a price change you’ve thought about.

What “everything included” means, since it’s the other half

Publishing a number only helps if the number is the whole story. Ours is meant to be: no per-module fees, no editions, every update included. Standard setup is led by our team and, for many labs, costs nothing beyond the subscription. Labs with bigger scope, custom report templates, historical data migration, custom features, may have a one-time implementation fee, and it’s scoped and quoted before you commit. Nothing gets billed that wasn’t agreed up front. The pricing page says exactly this, and the cost post walks through the questions to ask any vendor about the rest.

What we’d ask of you in return

Come to the demo with a real job: an actual request, its samples, the tests you’d run, the report you’d hand back. Tell us your seat counts. You’ll leave with a written quote that has every line on it.

And if we’re not the fit, we’ll say so. LIMSey is built for in-house engineering and materials test labs at manufacturers. If you run a clinical lab, a GxP release-testing lab, or a commercial lab whose core workflow is invoicing customers per sample, there are better-suited tools, and the roundup names them.

Pricing FAQ

Does LIMSey have hidden fees?

No. The subscription is $300 per lab seat and $45 per requester seat per month, every feature included. Any implementation work beyond standard setup is scoped and quoted before you commit, so the only numbers you’ll ever see are the ones already in writing.

Why is a lab seat $300 when some LIMS start at $50 per user?

Because the $300 includes everything and the $50 usually doesn’t. Entry tiers commonly leave out the audit trail, custom fields, integrations, or support, and the lab that needs those ends up two tiers up. Compare the tier you’d actually buy, and count who has to be a paid user. Our requester seat is what keeps the total reasonable when a whole engineering organization needs access.

Can I negotiate a discount?

The published price is the price, for everyone. The one exception is on the pricing page: labs with hundreds of requester seats can talk to us about volume pricing.

Do other LIMS vendors publish pricing?

A few do, and they deserve credit for it: QBench publishes annual tiers, and CloudLIMS publishes per-user rates. Most mid-market vendors don’t, and enterprise platforms can’t in any meaningful way, because implementation and consulting are the real cost. When there’s no number, ask for the implementation estimate before the license quote.

Why not just ask for a quote like everyone else?

You can. A demo ends with a written quote either way. Publishing the prices just means you know what the quote will say before you spend an hour finding out.