Government technology pricing is often hidden until a buyer has spent weeks in discovery calls. That makes it hard for a small office to know whether a product is realistic and hard for a larger agency to compare vendors on equal terms.
Public procurement records show why buyers are cautious. In 2025, Joliet, Illinois approved nearly $30,000 for one year of GovQA FOIA software. Collin County, Texas approved more than $60,000 for its annual GovQA renewal. A 2025 Laserfiche renewal for Collin County totaled more than $154,000 in annual support and subscriptions.
Case-management purchases can climb much higher. Minneapolis increased a prosecutor case-management contract to $664,650, while large court and statewide document-system contracts can reach millions.
Those systems may be worth their price. The problem is that smaller buyers are often priced out before they can modernize.
ZephCMS is being built for organizations that need serious workflow, records, security, and administrative capability without accepting the assumption that government software must always carry an enterprise-sized price.
Our goal is not to be the cheapest software on the internet. It is to be the most defensible value in the room.
Our published starting prices
- Document Archive: from $10,000 per year
- Public Portal: from $12,000 per year
- Custom Case Management: from $18,000 per year
- MDI Management: from $24,000 per year
Each product scales through five annual-volume bands. Even the 10,001+ tier has a published starting price. Implementation is shown separately so buyers can distinguish recurring software cost from one-time configuration, migration, integration, and training work.
Why volume instead of per-seat pricing?
Charging for every login can punish collaboration. Supervisors, records staff, investigators, administrators, and occasional users may all need access to the same operation. Pricing around managed volume and solution complexity is a better reflection of the work the platform supports.
Where the market examples came from
The examples above are public government records, including the City of Joliet GovQA award, the Collin County GovQA renewal, the Collin County Laserfiche renewal, and the Minneapolis case-management contract amendment.
Transparent pricing does not eliminate the need for discovery. It eliminates the unnecessary mystery around whether the conversation is worth having.