CMMS Pricing

1. DO YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR A CMMS?!

Nearly 30% of web queries regarding CMMS are for free CMMS solutions. So yes, there are high-performance and truly free solutions. You probably have Facebook, LinkedIn, or WhatsApp in mind.

But….

Several conditions must be met for a product to be free:

• Option 1: It isn’t truly high-performance and/or not entirely free
• Option 2: You are the product
• Option 3: It is created by a community of volunteer enthusiasts who invest their savings to run the solution and offer a significant portion of their time during the week to support users, train them, and resolve issues. They spend their own savings on structural costs and servers.

Our comments:

• Option 1: Yes, be careful!
• Option 2: Complicated; market size is too small + low return on investment + GDPR
• Option 3: We have been looking for a few years now (and we are not alone), and we are certain: this last option does not exist.

Conclusion: Unless you spend hundreds of hours developing a solution, in short, give up the search for a long-term free CMMS.

Paying, why not, but why?

At Bob! Desk, to keep the business running, we are organized into three departments:

• Marketing and Acquisition Department
• Support and Operations Department
• IT Department
• as well as Management and Support Services

This is generally the same organization in all companies offering SaaS-type software.

The Minimum Price (MP) can therefore be expressed as follows:

MP = (Sum of costs (development + maintenance + IT + support + acquisition + overhead) * margin) / number of clients

Thank you, but what should we take away from this formula?

The price of a CMMS is low if the majority of the price components are low, which is often a bad sign… we detail the associated elements and/or risks:

• Development cost is low
• → Very junior team or old solution → If old, beware of the technology and UX
• Maintenance cost is low
• → Weak or non-existent IT team → Beware of crashes and stagnation
• Support cost is low
• → Weak or non-existent support team → Cross your fingers that everything works
• IT costs are low
• → Highly positive; this is the expense category that should remain low. It indicates that the solution is well-designed and runs on modern, low-cost tools.
• Acquisition cost is low
• → Option A: The company does an excellent job with acquisition and maintains a low cost
• → Option B: The company is not growing, is no longer investing—basically, the beginning of the end.

Focus: Regarding acquisition cost

Those familiar with investor language know what “LTV” or “Lifetime Value” is.

LTV corresponds to the total revenue from a client during their lifetime (as a client). Since SaaS LTV is relatively high, software publishers fight a fierce battle to capture and convert clients. This competition leads to an increase in acquisition costs and pushes the CAC (average customer acquisition cost) toward an average value between €400 and €1,500 excl. VAT.

In short, capturing a client in the CMMS sector costs at least €400.

In summary, to move to the next point: Paying is a very good sign!

It means giving yourself the opportunity to choose a daily CMMS software that suits you perfectly. It also means being able to count on a responsive and available team, capable of saving you time and money! Oops, I’m going a bit too fast; we’ll talk about gains in the next chapter, see you there!

2. WHAT BUDGET SHOULD BE ALLOCATED TO CMMS SOFTWARE?

We’ll try to put you on the right track with two riddles:

Riddle 1:

“You are the production director of a multinational, and a consultant from a well-known and perfectly respectable firm knocks on the door and asks for three million euros to help you solve a problem you hadn’t identified. What do you tell them?”

Riddle 2:

“You are sitting in a three-seat row on a plane; you are on the right.

The middle passenger proposes the following game: ‘I will offer the passenger on the left a sum, let’s say 3 million. They will go first and take whatever share they want; you can freely leave with the remaining share. If you refuse the remaining share, I keep the 3 million, and neither you nor they win a single cent.’ You agree to play; anyway, your vintage walkman is out of batteries. The game starts, and the passenger on the left takes €2,995,000. You are left with €5,000. Do you accept?”

In both riddles above, one piece of advice: “Context is KING.” Well, for choosing CMMS software, it’s the same!

The right question to ask is: “What do I gain (compared to what I pay)?”

Also, in both cases, a purely rational decision would be to accept.

Let’s start with what you pay; it’s rather simple and fixed.

For the benefits, however, even if the list is much longer, they are less tangible and therefore harder to justify (to the person granting the budget).

The customer is, of course, the central component in a store’s success, but the employee is ALSO a central component. No sales if there are no employees in the stores, so they must work in good conditions, be proud of their premises, and be motivated. They then convey a positive message.

Direct benefits:

• time savings
• elimination of repetitive and useless actions
• gains in terms of organization and visibility
• reduction in processing time
• real-time accessible data
• statistics and dashboards
• ease of use

Indirect benefits:

• improved job attractiveness and reduced turnover
• simplified onboarding for new employees
• employee motivation
• better analysis of cost centers and optimizations
• better operational decisions based on data
• etc.

These benefits are very often underestimated by management teams who retort and/or often have the following responses in mind:

• We’ve managed so far, so it’s not mandatory, right?!
• But why software? Can’t you manage without it? (Suspicion of incompetence).
• Yes, of course it’s good. Yes, I’m sure it helps you, but sorry, we don’t have the budget.

Indeed, faced with the requested budget, the calculation of benefits is intangible, which puts requesters in a delicate situation to justify an expense with indicators that are difficult to calculate. To help you estimate the cost-benefit ratio, here is a simple method allowing you to estimate the benefit of a CMMS via the calculation of the Minimum Optimization Benefit (MOB),

MOB = OB * Optimization coefficient

1) Calculate the optimizable base (OB)

To calculate the OB or Optimizable Base:

• If you are a client
• Monthly net salaries of the team (management and internal technicians) x12 x2.5
• If you are a technical company
• Monthly net salaries of supervisors (management) x12 x2.2
• + Monthly revenue billed by all technicians using the solution x12

+ services in € excl. VAT purchased (excluding equipment) from providers x12

+ number of departures during the year within the maintenance and technician team x €5,000

+ the sum of costs for defects, penalties, closures, second visits, and warranty failures for the year expressed in €

2) Determine the optimization coefficient

If the annual OB amount is greater than €100,000: use a coefficient of 5%.

If the annual OB amount is greater than €1,000,000: use a coefficient of 4%.

If the annual OB amount is greater than €5,000,000: use a coefficient of 3%.

If the annual OB amount is greater than €10,000,000: use a coefficient of 2%.

The optimization coefficient corresponds to a minimal estimation of the gains and optimizations brought by the implementation of CMMS software.

3) Calculate the Minimum Optimization Benefit – MOB

Multiply the OB by the optimization coefficient to get the MOB, an estimate of the annual budget you can confidently allocate to a complete intervention and maintenance management solution if you don’t have one yet. If you pay for your CMMS an amount equal to or less than the MOB, the CMMS is “free”; it costs you nothing, it generates profit.

3. LAST STEP BEFORE CMMS PRICING: CRITERIA AND EXCLUSIONS TO CONSIDER?

We will speak here exclusively about software in SaaS mode (“Software as a Service”), as opposed to “heavy” software that requires installation.

Indeed:

• It is important to compare elements of the same nature
• The advantages of SaaS software today far outweigh the disadvantages
• The content and criteria of SaaS offers are perfectly known, and are a priori (meaning before purchase) comparable and verifiable

Beyond the price of the CMMS, we draw your attention to the following evaluation points which we believe are relevant criteria for analyzing SaaS intervention or maintenance management software.

Objective selection criteria:

• The publisher understands my needs, supports me, and seems to understand my business
• Does the solution suit me? Does it fit like a glove?
• Training should not be mandatory for getting started but should be seen as a plus
• The team’s sense of contact and service
• Quality of the customer experience and software design

There you go; now that you know the main components of the offer, we can move on to the price.

4. THE (RIGHT) PRICES FOR A CMMS-TYPE SOLUTION

Rates for technical companies

Usage

If you are looking for a technical management and maintenance solution to manage your technicians and/or subcontractors and eventually wish to provide access to your clients, you are in the right section.

Pricing

Most common market pricing: per user or per field technician

→ Market rate: between €29 excl. VAT and €60 excl. VAT per month per user

Below that, suspicious; above that, not necessarily justified.

Advice

For this type of software, unless you are a very large organization:

• No training fees; otherwise, the solution is too complex.
• No setup fees unless you require connections to your internal tools and/or specific developments or support

→ Rates for managing multi-site operations (stores, premises, etc.) with centralized management

Usage

If you are looking for a technical management and maintenance solution to manage your points of sale or stores with centralized management (not managed locally by the entities), you are in the right section. You will mainly integrate your external providers and potentially, to a lesser extent, technicians.

Pricing

Most common market pricing: by structure size, generally expressed in number of sites

→ Market rate: monthly pricing per site between €6 excl. VAT and €30 excl. VAT

For this type of configuration, and to give you an order of magnitude of the prices charged by players meeting the aforementioned conditions, here is a rough grid of average monthly rates in “run” mode:

• Network of 50 points of sale: between €400 excl. VAT and €900 excl. VAT
• Network of 100 points of sale: between €800 excl. VAT and €1,500 excl. VAT
• Network of 500 points of sale: between €2,000 excl. VAT and €4,000 excl. VAT
• Network of over 700 points of sale: starting from €3,000 excl. VAT

Advice

For networks of significant size with a maintenance team, you should expect setup fees generally ranging from €3,000 excl. VAT to over €50,000 for very significant projects.

→ Rates for networks managing maintenance and interventions in a decentralized manner

Usage

If you are looking for a technical management and maintenance solution to manage your points of sale with decentralized management. In short, each local unit has its own account. You can also, for example, benefit from a headquarters account allowing you to consolidate all data, interventions, maintenance, and statistics. If this is what you are looking for, you are on the right track.

Pricing

Most common market pricing: by structure size, generally expressed in number of sites

→ Market rate: monthly pricing per site between €50 excl. VAT and €500 excl. VAT.

The rate is degressive based on the number of sites. Since volumes vary greatly from one client to another, rates are also very variable. There are differences of more than 250 between the smallest clients and the very, very large ones.

Advice

As these are generally significant projects, software setup fees are often observed, which may include: project management, specific developments and/or connections, and training.

5. ADVICE AND CONCLUSION

Our advice and our conclusion:

We know the sector a bit, and if your choice falls on a recent software in SaaS mode, with an elegant interface, an available and responsive team, and it ticks all the criteria listed above, there is a high probability that you are not making a bad choice. Better yet, there is a very high probability that the price paid is correct and even low compared to the benefits you will enjoy.

Also, our opinion and recommendation would be to choose based on the following criteria in order of priority:

• Technical robustness of the software
• UX
• Relationship with the sales, support, and IT teams

Finally, and this is the most important sentence of the article: a CMMS software costs nothing; it generates profit!

If you have employees, a team of subcontractors, and/or sites to manage and this is your daily life, a suitable CMMS will save you money.