Why we publish our pricing

Almost every pharmacy software vendor I’ve evaluated — for dispatch, for delivery, for adjudication, for anything operational — hides their pricing behind a demo call, a qualification form, or a “let’s talk.” You can’t find the number anywhere. You have to earn it.

When I was building ScripRun I had to decide whether we’d do the same. We didn’t. The tiers, the delivery caps, the overage rate — all of it is on our pricing page. This post is about why, because I don’t think the reasons vendors hide their pricing are dishonest. I just don’t think those reasons are good enough.

Why vendors hide pricing

There are three real reasons, and they all make sense from the vendor’s side of the table.

1. Price discrimination

If your price is public, every customer pays roughly the same number. If it’s not, you can charge a 10-location group twice what you charge a single-store owner, for identical software, and nobody is comparing notes. The margin on bigger accounts is better. That is genuinely good for the vendor.

2. Sales friction as a filter

A demo call is a qualification tool. It takes 45 minutes out of a pharmacy owner’s week, and in exchange, the vendor’s sales team finds out whether the pharmacy is big enough, serious enough, and able to make a decision. The hidden price is part of the filter: if you weren’t willing to do a call to find out, you probably weren’t a real buyer anyway.

3. Moat-by-friction

Public pricing makes comparison trivial. Hidden pricing means a pharmacy evaluating two vendors has to do twice the work to compare them. That friction slows churn and slows new competitors. Every pharmacy software category looks like this, and it’s not an accident.

What hidden pricing costs the buyer

All three reasons above help the vendor. None of them help the pharmacy.

• Time.If you’re evaluating three vendors, hidden pricing means three discovery calls, three “let me put together a custom quote,” three follow-ups, three emails from account executives. Two weeks of calendar you didn’t want to spend.
• Negotiating leverage.You don’t know what the vendor normally charges. They know exactly what they want to charge you. That asymmetry is not an accident.
• Decision quality.You make better choices when you can compare options on price and value side by side. Hidden pricing forces the decision back onto “how well did the salesperson like me,” which is nobody’s favorite way to run procurement.
• Honest filtering.If the price is too high for your pharmacy, you deserve to know on day one — not after you’ve invested four hours in demos. Hidden pricing wastes both sides’ time when there’s no deal to be made.

When a quote-based model is legitimate

To be fair: some software is complicated enough that a list price genuinely can’t work. Enterprise deals with custom integrations, dedicated infrastructure, multi-year commitments, or real professional-services scopes — those can’t be shrink-wrapped. A custom EHR install for a hospital system is not the same product as a pharmacy delivery dashboard.

The question is whether the vendor’s product actually warrants that complexity. For most operational SaaS — dispatch, routing, tracking, notifications — it does not. The product behaves the same whether a Miami pharmacy or a Dallas pharmacy is using it. A published tier works fine.

What we did instead

We put four tiers on the pricing pagewith the monthly price, the delivery cap, and the overage rate. Everyone pays those same numbers. If you want unlimited deliveries and custom branding, that’s a higher tier and the price is published too. A pharmacy can decide whether we’re in their budget in thirty seconds, not thirty minutes.

We accepted the tradeoffs. The first one is that some pharmacies will see our price and click away. That’s a feature: we don’t have to spend a sales hour finding out that the deal wasn’t viable. The second is that we can’t charge a chain twice what we charge a single store for the same thing. If we ever want to, we’ll do it openly with an Enterprise tier and a feature difference that earns it.

The philosophy, in one sentence

The shortest path to the right customer is telling them the price. Everything else is a tax on their time, and they’re already running a pharmacy.

If you look at our pricing and think it’s not for you, we’d rather you know on the first visit than on the third sales call. That’s the whole idea.