I get this question more than almost any other, and I used to hate answering it, because the honest answer sounds evasive: it depends. But it depends on things you can actually count, so let me give you the way I think about it instead of a number I’d have to make up.
I’m a practicing attorney. I run a plaintiffs’ practice, and for years I also ran the software stack behind it — which is to say I ran a pile of subscriptions I’d half-forgotten I was paying for. I built the system I use now because I got tired of not being able to answer this exact question about my own firm. So this is the framework I wish someone had handed me.
Stop asking “what does software cost” and start asking “what do I pay”
The reason “how much should it cost” has no clean answer is that almost nobody pays one bill. You pay several, and they don’t arrive together, so you never see the total in one place. When I finally sat down and listed mine, here’s the shape of what I found — and it’s the shape I see at most small firms:
- A case-management system, billed per seat.
- A marketing arrangement — an agency retainer, or a website plus an SEO subscription, or both.
- Billing and payments, sometimes bundled with the case system, often not.
- Intake or CRM, because the case system wasn’t built to chase leads.
- A phone or work-line service.
- E-signature, on its own little plan.
- And lately, a scatter of point AI tools — a writing assistant here, a transcription thing there.
None of those is outrageous on its own. That’s the trap. Each one is “only” forty or eighty or a couple hundred dollars, so each one clears the bar of “worth it,” and the sum never gets audited because the sum never appears.
The arithmetic that actually matters: per-seat versus per-firm
Here’s the part that surprised me when I did it honestly. The sticker price isn’t the cost. The pricing model is the cost.
Anything billed per seat has a hidden multiplier: your headcount. A tool at a modest per-user rate looks cheap when it’s just you. Add a paralegal, a second attorney, an intake person, and that one line quietly triples — and you usually have several per-seat lines doing this at once. So your software bill grows every time your firm grows, which is exactly backwards from how you’d want it to work. Growth should make you more efficient, not raise your overhead per head.
A flat, per-firm price does the opposite. It includes every seat, so the number doesn’t move when you hire. The first hire is “free” from a software standpoint, and so is the fifth.
That’s the line I tell people to look for. Roughly past one or two people, a single flat fee that covers the whole job tends to beat a stack of per-seat tools — not because flat fees are magic, but because you stop paying the headcount multiplier on five different bills.
So, a real answer
If you want me to put a stake in the ground: a solo who’s genuinely running lean — one case tool, a cheap site, not much else — can keep total software spend low, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The firms that are overpaying are the ones with five-to-nine separate subscriptions and three or four per-seat lines, where the total has crept into “wait, how much?” territory without anyone deciding it should. I’ve been that firm. The fix wasn’t finding a cheaper version of each tool. It was collapsing the stack so there was one bill to look at and one price that didn’t punish me for hiring.
I won’t pretend I can tell you your number from here — I’d be guessing, and I don’t do made-up figures. But you can find it in about ten minutes. List every subscription and retainer, mark which ones bill per seat, multiply those by your real headcount, and add it up. That total, not any tool’s sticker price, is what your software costs. Once you can see it, the “should” answers itself.
That ten-minute exercise is exactly what I built the cost calculator to do — categories down one side, your real numbers down the other, the per-seat lines multiplied out for you. It stores nothing; it just shows you the total you’ve never seen in one place.