Why we publish our prices, and why almost nobody else in care tech does

Try this. Open the website of any care management system you've heard of and look for a price.

You'll find a "Request a quote" button, or a form that asks what kind of service you run, how many staff and, if you read carefully, who funds you. What you almost never find is a number.

That isn't an accident. It's the business model. And to understand it you have to go back a bit.

A short history of care tech

Generation one arrived around the turn of the century: desktop systems that turned paper forms into databases. Filing cabinets, digitised. Someone still typed everything, usually twice. Pricing was simple because the product was simple: a licence, a server, a support contract.

Generation two is what most of the sector runs on today. Cloud, mobile apps, dashboards, roughly 95% of the market. Somewhere in that shift, two things happened that changed how the sector gets charged.

First, the product went modular. Care plans in one module, incidents in another, family portal in a third, each with its own line on the invoice. "All in one place" quietly became a list of things you could pay extra for.

Second, and this is the sad bit, vendors worked out that the price of the software didn't need to bear any relation to the cost of the software. It could track the money flowing through the customer instead.

Following the money

A children's residential home might receive several thousand pounds a week per placement. A complex care service supporting people with high-acuity needs is funded at a similar level. A straightforward older persons' home on local authority rates is running on a fraction of that per person, and fighting for every pound of it.

Same software. Same servers. Same forms, give or take a field. Very different prices.

Because the question a quote-based model is really asking isn't "what does this cost us to provide?" It's "what can this customer afford?" Children's and complex care: loads of money, so charge it. Older persons' care: not much, so charge less and make it up on the modules. The price is set by the customer's funding stream, not the vendor's cost base.

I don't think the people who built this model are villains; it's where every industry drifts when nobody publishes a number. But it means a sector already starved of money spends it in the dark, and the providers with the least end up living inside a pricing model designed around the providers with the most.

What we did instead

Leafnotes publishes its prices. Bronze £10, Silver £16, Gold £22 per team member per month. Onboarding, migration, form tailoring and training included at every tier. Volume discounts published too: 2.5% above 100 team members, 5% above 200, 10% above 500. A children's home pays the same per team member as a dementia day centre. It's on the website.

Two reasons.

The first is the obvious one. This sector needs some openness and somebody has to go first. Providers deserve to know what something costs before they've given up three hours to a demo. If our numbers being public drags a few more into the open, good.

The second reason is the honest one.

Leafnotes is not old software with a new price tag. Every day it processes thousands of records: voice notes turned into professional case notes, incidents structured and routed, care plans checked against the day's evidence, risks flagged, inspection evidence compiled as it happens. That intelligence is why a support worker's write-up drops from thirty minutes to five, and why a Regulation 45 review generates instead of eating a fortnight. But it has a raw cost. Every one of those thousands of records is actually processed, by actual compute, and that bill is real in a way a generation-two database sitting quietly on a server never was.

So our price reflects what it costs to run the thing well, plus a fair margin, and it's the same for everyone. We would rather explain that openly than hide it behind a quote form and charge you according to how well-funded you look.

The ask

Next time a vendor tells you pricing is "tailored to your organisation", ask them what it's tailored to. If the honest answer is "your funding", you've learned something worth knowing.

And if you want to know what Leafnotes costs, you don't need to ask anyone.

Leon Rossiter is CEO of Leaf AI, the company behind Leafnotes — voice-first, AI-native case management for social care. Disagreements, and price lists, to leon@lolabyleaf.com.