Key points
- The check is free, and the gap it reveals is not small when it is there: a quote sitting $40 per seat above the median on 1,000 seats is $40,000 a year of negotiating room you now know about before you reply to the rep.
A SKU, a seat count, and a real answer
The interaction is deliberately trivial. Choose the specific product or edition from a short list, enter how many units you are buying and the per-unit price on your quote, and the check places you against the distribution of comparable deal cohorts. The result is not a vague sense of good or bad. It is your rank, a market low, median, and high per unit, and the dollar gap between your price and the median, shown on a simple dial with a plain verdict. In one screen you learn whether your quote is a strong price, an average one, or one you should be arguing about.
It also carries one grounded insight, a short read on your specific result, because a number without interpretation is only half useful. The whole thing is aggregates only: you never see another buyer's deal, and no individual transaction is exposed, only the shape of the market your price falls into. It is the same benchmarking discipline the full platform runs on, distilled down to the one question and the one answer that fit in a public page.
Pick the SKU, enter seats and unit price, and the dial places your quote against modelled deal cohorts. A verdict in a moment, no account.
THE SAME JOB, TWICE
TODAY, BY HAND
A vendor quote lands and the only available sanity check is a shrug or a half remembered figure from the last deal.
You email a peer at another company and ask, quietly, what they paid, and get an answer you cannot verify.
Standing up a benchmarking engagement or a trial is the wrong weight of response to a two minute question, so most quotes go unchecked.
The negotiation proceeds without anyone knowing whether the headline unit price was fair to begin with.
Days of asking around, or no check at all
WITH ISVCOSELL
Open the public price check page, no account, no login, no call, and pick the vendor and the specific product or edition.
Enter your seat count and the per-unit price on the quote.
Read the result: your rank, the market low, median, and high per unit, the dollar gap to the median, and one grounded insight on your specific placement.
If the inputs fall outside what the data can benchmark honestly, take the refusal at face value and dig deeper before negotiating on it.
Under two minutes to a grounded verdict
What changes: the most common question in software buying, is this price fair, goes from days of asking around to a two minute answer against modelled deal cohorts. The check is free, and the gap it reveals is not small when it is there: a quote sitting $40 per seat above the median on 1,000 seats is $40,000 a year of negotiating room you now know about before you reply to the rep.
PART TWO
It refuses to answer when it cannot answer honestly
The most important feature of the free price check is the one that says no. A public tool that always returns a confident number would be worse than useless, it would be misleading, because not every input can be benchmarked honestly. So the check refuses in the cases where an answer would not be defensible: a seat count outside the range the data covers, a price so far outside the observed band that it suggests a different deal structure, a cohort too thin to support a real comparison. In those cases it says plainly that it cannot give you a reliable read, rather than inventing one.
That restraint is a deliberate honesty gate, and it extends to which vendors even appear. A vendor is only listed where the underlying dataset is genuinely defensible on a simple per-unit dial, and vendors whose data does not calibrate cleanly are left off rather than shipped with a shaky number. A public price check that occasionally admits it cannot help you is far more trustworthy than one that always has an answer, because the whole value of the thing is that when it does give you a number, you can believe it.
"A public price tool that always has a confident answer is a marketing gimmick. One that sometimes says "I cannot benchmark that honestly" is a benchmark."
PART THREE
The front door, not the whole house
The free check is intentionally narrow, and that is its role. It answers one question, is this price fair, for a curated set of vendors, and it does not try to be the negotiation, the contract review, or the renewal plan. It is the front door: the fastest possible way to get a real, grounded read on a quote, which for many people is all they need in that moment, and for some is the thing that shows them the full approach is worth a closer look.
When you do want to go further, the path is there. If the check tells you a quote is well above market, the natural next step is to understand why and what to do about it, and that is where the deeper benchmarking, the negotiation tools, and the playbooks pick up. But there is no obligation to walk through that door. The price check earns its place by being genuinely useful on its own, a free, honest answer to the most common question in software buying, given without asking for anything first.
The result carries one grounded insight, and a path onward for anyone who wants to understand the gap and act on it.
THE GUT CHECK
What a free price check gives you
1 A real placement. Your unit price against the distribution of comparable deal cohorts, ranked with market low, median, and high, not a vague verdict.
2 The dollar gap. How far your price sits from the median in real money, so the answer is actionable, not just a color on a dial.
3 An honest refusal. When your inputs fall outside what the data can benchmark, it says so, rather than returning a confident number it cannot stand behind.
4 No account, no call. A grounded answer to "are we overpaying?" for the flagship vendors, given freely, as the front door to the deeper approach.
THE HONEST LIMIT
A sanity check, not the full picture
A per-unit price check is a fast read, not a complete analysis. It looks at the unit price you enter and cannot see the parts of your deal that live elsewhere, the term, the bundle, the support scope, the concessions traded around the number. A quote that looks high on the dial might be reasonable once the whole structure is understood, and one that looks fair might hide a poor term. The check tells you whether the headline unit price is in the right neighbourhood, which is genuinely useful and deliberately limited.
What it removes is the excuse for flying blind on the most basic question. Before the free price check, sanity-checking a quote meant either trusting a memory or standing up a whole engagement, so most quotes went unchecked. A grounded, honest, no-account answer to "are we overpaying?" means that question always has a real answer within reach, which is exactly where a good negotiation starts, with a number you can trust about the number in front of you.
About the author
Morten Andersen, Cofounder, ISVCOSELL
Morten brings two decades of enterprise and software procurement, with stints across Oracle, IBM, SAP, and Salesforce shaping how he reads a deal. He has led sourcing through hundreds of renewals, from mid market order forms to nine figure global agreements, and learned that the buyers who win are the ones who walk in knowing the market. He built ISVCOSELL to make that pattern recognition repeatable.
More posts by Morten Connect on LinkedIn →
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