What IFRS S2 reporting software costs, and why almost nobody publishes a price

Try to budget for IFRS S2 software and you hit the same wall on every vendor site. A features page, a customer logo strip, and a button that says Request a demo.

No price. Not a range, not a starting figure, not a per-user number.

That is a deliberate choice, and it has costs for you. Here is how the pricing actually works, and what to expect around it.

Why you cannot find a price

There are three reasons, and it is worth separating them, because only one is really about your company.

Deals are negotiated. Enterprise software in this category is priced per customer. A published number sets a ceiling the vendor then has to argue down from, so they publish nothing and start from your budget instead.

Scope genuinely varies. One entity with two sites and a group of forty subsidiaries across nine jurisdictions are not the same product engagement. Vendors argue that a single number would mislead. There is something to that.

The demo gate captures a lead. This one is about sales, not about you. Every request-a-demo form is a qualified lead, and a price on the page loses some of them.

The result is that you cannot build a budget line until you are already inside a sales process, which is exactly when your bargaining position is weakest.

The four pricing models you will meet

Seat-based. Per user, per month. It looks cheap when you price it for two people, then grows as you add reviewers, approvers and a read-only seat for your assurance provider. Ask whether the auditor seat is chargeable, because that answer moves the total.

Entity-based. Priced per reporting entity or per cycle. Predictable for a single company, and expensive for a group. If you are consolidating fifteen subsidiaries, ask early how they count entities.

Consultant-bundled. The software arrives inside an advisory engagement, on one invoice. Convenient, and it makes the software cost impossible to separate. When you want to renew the tool without the advice, there is often no unbundled price.

Enterprise quote. No published number at all. Cost depends on your size, your urgency and how the negotiation goes.

What actually drives the number

Whatever the model, the same four things move the price: how many entities you report, how many people touch the process, how much of Scope 3 you are attempting, and whether you need the vendor's people as well as their product.

That last one is the biggest swing factor and the least discussed. Software and services are priced very differently, and a bundled quote can be several times the licence alone.

The costs that sit outside the software line

The licence is one line in a budget that has at least five.

Assurance fees. Set by your assurance provider, not your software vendor, and they rise as you move from limited to reasonable assurance, because the work deepens — covered in limited versus reasonable assurance.

Internal time. Almost always the largest line, and almost never in the budget. Someone chases fourteen sites for consumption data. Someone else reconciles it. Someone argues about the boundary for a week.

Emission factor data. Free from some publishers, licensed from others, depending on your jurisdiction and sector.

Advisory support. Optional in principle. In a first cycle it is frequently the single largest invoice.

I am not going to attach numbers to those. They vary by company, sector and jurisdiction, and an invented figure would be worse than no figure.

What a mid-market first-cycle reporter should expect

What I can tell you honestly is the shape rather than the amount.

Expect the software to be the smallest of the three main lines, assurance to be larger, and internal time to be larger still. Expect year one to cost materially more than year two, because the boundary work, the methodology decisions and the first evidence collection are one-off. And expect the bill to grow when assurance moves from limited to reasonable, because your assurer's work grows.

If a vendor tells you their product removes the internal time entirely, that is the claim to test hardest.

Our own pricing, stated plainly

We publish ours because the alternative annoyed me as a buyer.

Free is the readiness diagnostic. Twenty-five questions, a scored report, no card and no signup.

Practitioner is $399 a month, or $3,990 a year with two months free. One reporting cycle, one entity, all 33 IFRS S2 disclosure templates, the full audit trail with hashed evidence, and a read-only seat for your auditor included.

Pro is $799 a month, or $7,990 a year on the same annual basis. It adds multiple entities and cycles, up to five users with roles, and Scope 3 support.

Billing is through Paddle, with a 14-day cancellation right. The current terms are on the pricing page, which is the authoritative version if anything here has aged.

Two things I will not do. I will not tell you what a competitor charges, because they do not publish it and I would be guessing. And I will not claim we are cheaper, for the same reason.

What I will say is that we are a design-partner-stage product with a short track record, and our SOC 2 is in progress rather than certified. If you need a long reference list, we do not have one yet. That is a real reason to choose someone else, and it belongs in a pricing conversation.

The position: a vendor who will not show you a price before a demo is telling you something about the relationship. Not necessarily something bad — complex deals genuinely vary. But you are entitled to build a budget without first sitting through a sales call, and the criteria for judging what you get are in how to evaluate IFRS S2 reporting software.

Common questions

How much does IFRS S2 reporting software cost?

Ours is published: Practitioner is 399 US dollars a month or 3,990 a year, and Pro is 799 a month or 7,990 a year, with two months free on annual billing. Most vendors in this category do not publish a number at all and quote after a demo, so any figure you see attributed to them in a comparison article is an estimate rather than a price.

Why do sustainability software vendors hide their pricing?

Three reasons, and only one of them is about you. Enterprise deals are negotiated per customer, so a published number weakens the vendor. Scope varies enormously between a single entity and a forty-subsidiary group. And a demo gate captures a lead. The cost to you is that budgeting becomes guesswork until you are already in a sales process.

What is the biggest cost in a first reporting cycle?

Usually internal time, and it is the line almost nobody budgets. Collecting site data, chasing suppliers, agreeing the boundary and assembling evidence takes weeks of finance and operations time. Software and assurance fees are visible; the internal cost is real and invisible.

Should I buy software or use consultants for my first cycle?

They solve different problems. A consultant helps you decide what to disclose and how to measure it. Software is what holds the evidence and the approvals afterwards, cycle after cycle. Buying advice and calling it a system is the mistake that shows up in year two, when the advisor has gone and the record went with them.