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What does switching actually cost?

The subscription side comes from verified entry prices in the HelpCompare dataset. The labor side — exporting data, rebuilding workflows, retraining people — is yours to enter, because we will not invent hours for your team. Together they give a net figure and a break-even point.

96 tools with published entry prices 7 quote-only or percentage-priced Prices dated and sourced
Your switching labor — enter your own estimates (we do not model these)

What this does, and does not, do

  • Subscription cost is the tool’s cheapest published plan, multiplied by your seats when the vendor bills per user, or taken flat when it bills per account. It is a floor: add-ons, seat minimums, plan tiers and annual-versus-monthly billing can raise it, and the linked comparison page models those.
  • Labor cost is entirely your inputs. Migration guides on HelpCompare describe what transfers and what you rebuild by hand; they do not assign hours, because that depends on your data and your people.
  • Quote-only tools (no published price) show as “not published” and the subscription delta is left blank rather than guessed.
  • Break-even is the number of months of subscription savings needed to pay back the one-off labor. If the destination costs more, there is no break-even and the tool says so.

Where the numbers come from

Every entry price is the one recorded on the HelpCompare comparison page for that tool, read from the vendor’s own pricing page and dated. The estimator reads the same dataset published at /data/tools.json, so it can never disagree with the data hub. The link for each figure appears under the result.

Share a scenario by copying the page URL — the tools, seat count and horizon are kept in the address so a colleague (or an AI assistant) lands on the same result.

From shortlist to switched

Built for the leader who owns the selection, answers for the spend, drives the rollout, and lives with the results. HelpCompare covers the whole decision, not just the first step.

Bill Belcamino, founder of HelpCompare
About the author

Bill Belcamino

Founder and author, HelpCompare

Engineer by training, operator by experience, marketer by choice. Bill spent nine years as an engineer at HP, was COO of Auctiva (the number one third-party selling platform on eBay, past 200,000 users) and ran Google’s $70M/year search syndication partnership at Alot.com. Then he spent 13 years building his own web properties with his own money at stake. He has bought, trialled, integrated and cancelled more SaaS tools than he can count, and started HelpCompare because the real cost of switching tools is the part nobody covers.

“I’ve sat on both sides of the table: the agency recommending the tool and the client paying for it.”

Researched and fact-checked by the HelpCompare team. No paid sponsorships, no affiliate commissions.