MLM Software Price & Pricing Plans

Why the numbers vary so much

Ask five vendors to quote the same brief and you will get answers spanning an order of magnitude. It is tempting to read that as some vendors being expensive. Usually they are quoting different scopes, and the differences are specific enough to check.

Cost driver one: plan complexity

This is the big one, and it is not distributor count.

The reason a matching bonus and pools cost more than they look is that they interact with everything else. A matching bonus is a percentage of another component’s payout, so it cannot be computed independently and its cost moves whenever the underlying component’s does. A pool has to be divided among a set of qualifiers determined by the same run that is computing it. Ordering these correctly, and making the ordering reproducible for a past period, is where the engineering is.

The plan calculator will show you the payout ratio of a structure before you commit to it. It is worth doing before you ask anyone for a quote, because it sometimes changes the plan.

Cost driver two: scope, item by item

Each of these is a discrete cost and each gets assumed into “MLM software” regularly:

• Corporate marketing site
• Storefront, and replicated distributor storefronts
• Distributor back office
• Corporate console
• Native mobile apps — see mobile app development for whether you need them
• ERP or accounting integration
• Payment gateway and payout rails, per market
• Multi-currency
• Additional languages

A quote that does not enumerate these is not comparable to one that does.

Cost driver three: markets

Two countries is not a translation exercise. It is two tax treatments, two sets of payout rails, two compliance positions and often two payment providers. The United States and South Africa — the two markets this platform is built around — differ on sales tax versus VAT, on distributor tax documentation, on data protection law, and on what a payout to an individual requires.

Adding a second market is one of the larger discrete line items in a direct selling software project, and it is frequently quoted as a language pack.

Cost driver four: migration

If you have an existing platform, moving off it means moving:

• both genealogy trees, with structure intact,
• complete commission history that must continue to reconcile to what was paid,
• distributor identities that people are already logged into,
• order history, documents, and content.

Commission history is the hard part. It cannot be approximated, because a distributor will look up a statement from two years ago and it has to match what they were paid. This is a project in its own right, and it is the single item most often absent from a low quote.

What a low quote usually excludes

Ask about each of these specifically:

1. Is the commission engine implementing my plan, or a fixed plan with parameters?
2. Is data migration included, and does historical commission reconcile after it?
3. Are agreement versioning, income disclosure, retail order classification and the audit trail included? These cannot be added retrospectively, because the data was never captured.
4. Is the second market scoped as tax, payouts and compliance, or as translation?

A vendor quoting less because they are quoting less is being straightforward. The problem is that the four items above are invisible in a proposal until you ask.

What we do not charge for

Per distributor. Charging more as you grow, for a cost that does not grow proportionally, is the wrong shape. It also gives you a small incentive to keep inactive distributors off the platform, which is the opposite of what you want.

Per plan change, as a project. Plans change. An arrangement where every change is a new statement of work makes companies reluctant to fix a plan that is costing them money, and that is a worse outcome for both parties. Ongoing plan changes sit in the recurring cost.

Getting an actual number

A scoping conversation covering your plan document, your markets and your existing data produces a real figure rather than a range. The commitment we will make in return: if what you have described is smaller than a build justifies, we will say so during scoping and point you at what does fit, including options that are not us. The free and low cost pages exist for that reason.