The four things you are paying for

  • Software. Per-user subscription, a perpetual licence, or nothing for open source. Usually the smallest of the four.
  • Implementation. Discovery, configuration, data migration, integrations, testing and training. Where quotes diverge most.
  • Infrastructure. Hosting, backups, test environments. Modest for SaaS, a real ongoing line when self-hosted.
  • Ongoing support. Bug fixes, platform updates, new requirements, and keeping the e-invoicing integration working.

Want to know how this works out for your company? Send us the question as you would ask it.

What the software costs for twenty-five people

Zoho bills Egypt in pounds; these are its Egyptian prices, read on 29 September 2026. Frappe Cloud bills in dollars, read in August 2026; the pound figure is at 50.82 to the dollar on 1 September 2026 and moves with the rate at every renewal.

  • Zoho Books Premium, ten users included plus fifteen at E£45 each: E£1,327.50 a month, E£15,930 a year, billed annually with VAT on top. Accounting only, not a full ERP.
  • ERPNext: licence $0, open source under AGPL-3.0. A dedicated server on Frappe Cloud starts at $40 a month, about $480 a year — about E£24,400 — and that figure does not change when you hire.
  • Zoho One, all-employee plan, E£1,295 per employee: E£32,375 a month, E£388,500 a year — and every employee on payroll has to be licensed, not only the ones who use it.

What moves the implementation number

The same twenty-five-person company can be a four-week configuration or a six-month project. These decide which:

  • How far your processes sit from the system's standard behaviour. Every deviation is custom work you then maintain.
  • The state of your data. Years of spreadsheets with duplicate customers and no item coding is a project inside the project.
  • How many systems have to talk. Each integration is a build plus permanent maintenance.
  • Modules and entities. Finance for one company is a different exercise from finance, inventory, manufacturing and HR across three companies.
  • Whether ETA e-invoicing is in scope. It has its own testing cycle; if a quote does not mention it, ask.

The costs that do not appear in any proposal

  • Your team’s time. Discovery, testing, data cleanup and training pull your best people off their jobs for weeks.
  • Parallel running. While the old and new systems run side by side, you pay for both.

How to read a proposal so the number means something

  • Ask for the scope in modules and entities. "Full ERP implementation" is not a scope.
  • Ask what is excluded, in writing.
  • Ask how data migration is priced and on what assumption about your data. This is where fixed-price quotes turn into change requests.
  • Ask for the year-two number: support, hosting and renewals.