Auction software pricing has a trick in it: the number on the pricing page is the small one. The real cost arrives as a percentage of everything you sell.
Take the dominant setup — back-office software bundled with a bidding marketplace. The published rates look like this: a subscription from $95 a month, then 2% of hammer price, $0.25 per unique bid (capped at $150 per auction), $75 per webcast setup, and a dollar per card authorization (capped at $50 per auction).
A working example
Picture an ordinary small house: two online sales a month, $30,000 gross hammer each, a few hundred active bidders.
- Subscription: $95
- 2% of $60,000 hammer: $1,200
- Per-bid fees, two capped auctions: $300
- Webcast fees, two sales: $150
That's roughly $1,745 a month — about $21,000 a year — and the striking part is the shape, not just the size: the better your sales run, the more the software costs. Grow your hammer 50% and your software bill grows with it, even though the software did nothing new.
The part worth paying for
None of this means leaving the marketplaces. The bidder pool on a big marketplace is real value, and listing fees for bidder access are a fair trade. The question is narrower: should the software that catalogs your lots and prints your settlement statements take a percentage of your hammer?
Our answer is in our pricing: flat $99 a month, everything included, 0% of hammer — and we publish the comparison math on the Auction Flex & HiBid page so you can check it against your own volume. There's even a report in the product that keeps a running total of what your sales would have paid at 2%. It's a little pointed. It's also your money.