The IT Purchases You Can Price Today — and the Ones You Can't: A 2026 Procurement Guide

The rule: If your vendor sells the same product to every industry — cloud compute, Microsoft 365, a laptop — they'll show you a price today. If they sell something built for how *your* industry specifically operates — a core banking platform, a manufacturing execution system, an e-discovery tool — you're not getting a number until a salesperson scopes your deal. Knowing which bucket a purchase falls into, before you go looking for it, is the difference between budgeting for it and being ambushed by it.

If you own an IT or technology budget at a company in financial services, retail, manufacturing, or legal services, you've felt the gap this article is about. You can price out a cloud migration to the dollar from a calculator on a Tuesday afternoon. But ask your core banking vendor, your MES vendor, or your e-discovery vendor for a number, and you get a calendar link for a "discovery call" instead. That's not an accident, and it's not something to complain to your account rep about — it's a structural fact about how each category of software is sold, and once you can name the pattern, you can plan around it.

This guide does two things. First, it explains the rule that predicts which of your purchases will have a public price and which won't — a rule that has nothing to do with vendor size or how dominant they are in their category. Second, it walks through what companies in your industry specifically buy across hardware, software, and cloud, names the brands that dominate each category, and tells you, category by category, whether to expect a self-service checkout or a multi-month sales cycle. By the end, you should be able to look at any line item on next year's IT budget and know immediately which kind of purchase it is.

The Rule: Horizontal Infrastructure vs. Vertical Software

Here's the rule in practice. AWS and Microsoft Azure both run free, public pricing calculators — no account, no sales call, a number in under a minute. Microsoft 365 goes further and lists its enterprise pricing outright: E3 at $39 per user per month, E5 at $60. Gartner's 2025 market-share report put the worldwide public cloud IaaS market at $171.8 billion in 2024, growing 22.5% year over year, with AWS and Azure alone controlling roughly 62% of it — two vendors, both self-service, both transparent.

Now the other side. Temenos has topped IBS Intelligence's core banking Sales League Table for 21 straight years and has never published a price. Siemens' Opcenter scored highest in ABI Research's competitive assessment of manufacturing execution systems, ahead of Rockwell Automation's Plex — neither publishes one either. Every major e-discovery platform used by law firms — RelativityOne, DISCO, Everlaw, Casepoint, Exterro — shows "request a quote" and nothing else, checked directly against each vendor's own site.

The dividing line isn't company size. A $50 billion bank and a 40-person regional lender both get the same answer from Temenos: talk to sales. It's not market dominance either — Temenos is the clear category leader and still won't quote you. The actual variable is whether the software is horizontal (sold the same way to every industry, because it works the same way for every industry) or vertical (built around how one specific industry operates, where the right price depends entirely on your transaction volume, data volume, or connected-asset count). Horizontal software is a self-service business. Vertical software is a relationship business. Once you know which one you're buying, you know whether to open a calculator or start a sales conversation — and how much lead time to build into your budget cycle for the second kind.

Financial Services: Budgeting for Banks, Insurers, and Asset Managers

The one thing that changes in finance is how much of the stack falls into the vertical, quote-only bucket — compliance and audit requirements push even ordinary infrastructure toward negotiated contracts.

Hardware. Business laptops (Dell, HP, Lenovo) are commodity purchases with public SMB pricing — a real exception here is that this stays true even for finance, right up until you're buying hundreds at once, at which point it becomes an account negotiation regardless of vendor. Networking and security appliances (Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet) publish list prices that nobody actually pays — real pricing is set by reseller discount tier. Enterprise storage is a five-way negotiated market: Dell EMC, NetApp, Pure Storage, HPE, and Huawei are all named Leaders in Gartner's 2025 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms, and all five are quote-only. Specialized hardware — HSMs from Thales, Entrust, and Utimaco; market-data terminals like the Bloomberg Terminal and LSEG's Refinitiv Eikon — is licensed directly through enterprise sales, full stop.

Software. Core banking is the deepest vertical-software category in this entire report: Temenos, FIS, Finastra, Finacle (Infosys), TCS BaNCS, Oracle FLEXCUBE, Mambu, and Thought Machine dominate the field by consensus of both Gartner's Magic Quadrant and IBS Intelligence's league table, and not one of them publishes a price. GRC and compliance platforms (MetricStream, IBM OpenPages, Archer) follow the identical pattern. The one bright spot is productivity and SMB-tier security: Microsoft 365 is fully public, and CrowdStrike publishes self-service SMB tiers (Falcon Go, Falcon Pro) even though its enterprise-grade Falcon Complete is negotiated like everything else in this category.

Cloud. Raw compute on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud prices through the standard public calculators — until you add a compliance wrapper (AWS Financial Services, Azure for Financial Services), at which point that layer becomes negotiated even though the compute underneath is still metered publicly. Cloud-delivered core banking (Temenos SaaS, Mambu, nCino, Thought Machine Vault) inherited its pricing model unchanged from its on-prem predecessor. Backup and disaster recovery platforms like Veeam, Commvault, and Rubrik publish list pricing, but in practice are sold and discounted almost entirely through an MSP or reseller channel.

Bottom line for finance buyers: treat anything beyond commodity hardware and M365 as a negotiated capital purchase, not a subscription. The moment "core banking," "GRC," or "compliance cloud" appears on a budget line, the number doesn't exist yet — build a real sales cycle into your timeline, not a calculator lookup.

Retail: Budgeting for Stores and E-Commerce Operators

Retail is the most transparently-priced vertical in this report, for a simple reason: SMB retailers self-serve, so POS and e-commerce vendors compete openly on price to win them. Enterprise ERP is the one place that logic breaks down completely.

Hardware. POS terminals from Verifone, Ingenico (Worldline), Square (Block), and Toast are priced directly on the vendor's site — Square and Toast list hardware from $0 to roughly $799 right alongside the payments contract. Barcode scanners (Zebra, Honeywell, Datalogic) publish MSRP through distribution. Store networking has a genuine bright spot: Cisco Meraki and Ubiquiti both publish hardware and licensing pricing openly, which is unusual for enterprise networking gear in general.

Software. POS and inventory platforms — Square, Shopify POS, Lightspeed, NCR Voyix, Cin7 — all publish per-location monthly pricing. Then you hit enterprise ERP, and transparency disappears entirely: SAP S/4HANA Retail and Oracle Retail run $1M–$5M-plus over 18–36 months with no list price anywhere, and midmarket alternatives (NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP Business One) are still sold quote-only through a consultant-led deployment, not a signup form.

Cloud. E-commerce platforms are the single most transparently-priced software category in this entire report — Shopify publishes every tier including Plus, and BigCommerce and Adobe Commerce follow suit. Salesforce Commerce Cloud is retail's one enterprise-quote-only exception. Marketing and CRM tools (HubSpot, Klaviyo) publish full tiered pricing as well.

Bottom line for retail buyers: you can genuinely price-shop your POS and e-commerce stack the way you'd shop any consumer software — the numbers are public and comparable, so use that leverage. The instant you're evaluating an ERP replacement, switch mental models entirely: that's a capital project with a sales cycle, not a subscription decision, regardless of how transparent everything else in your stack has been.

Manufacturing: Budgeting for Plants and Industrial Operators

Manufacturing splits into two budgets that rarely share an owner — IT (the office, ERP, endpoints) and OT (the plant floor: MES, industrial networking, OT security). Everything that actually runs production sits in the vertical, negotiated bucket without exception.

Hardware. Ruggedized and industrial PCs (Panasonic Toughbook, Zebra, Advantech, Getac) and barcode/RFID hardware both publish MSRP but sell through industrial-automation distributors at negotiated prices. Industrial networking and OT security is fully quote-only: Cisco's industrial switches, Rockwell Automation, Siemens, and OT-security specialists Claroty and Nozomi Networks all price by connected-asset count through direct sales engagement. Servers and edge compute (Dell, HPE, Lenovo) have public configurator pricing, but volume plant deployments get negotiated separately regardless.

Software. MES is led by Siemens Opcenter and Rockwell Automation's SaaS-delivered Plex platform — the top two vendors in ABI Research's competitive assessment, and both sold through direct enterprise engagement with no published price. ERP (SAP S/4HANA, Oracle Fusion Cloud, Infor CloudSuite) follows the same pattern as retail's enterprise tier. PLM — the backbone that manages engineering data end to end (PTC Windchill, Siemens Teamcenter, Dassault ENOVIA) — is licensed per CAD-linked seat and negotiated per account. General endpoint security (Microsoft Defender, CrowdStrike, Trend Micro) runs through the standard reseller channel; OT-specific security stays in the Claroty/Nozomi quote-only lane.

Cloud. Industrial IoT platforms split down the middle: AWS IoT SiteWise is metered through AWS's standard calculator, while Siemens' Xcelerator/MindSphere platform and PTC ThingWorx are quote-only. Core IaaS runs on the usual public calculators.

Bottom line for manufacturing buyers: the plant floor — MES, PLM, OT security — runs on relationship-sold, negotiated software with zero exceptions found in this research. Budget it like capital equipment, with an RFP process and a multi-quarter timeline, not like a software subscription.

Law Firms: Budgeting for Practices That Run Cases and Manage Matters

Legal software splits sharply by what it's used for, more than by firm size. Practice-management software aimed at running the business of the firm is aggressively public-priced. The systems that hold the actual client matters — document management and e-discovery — are quote-only without a single exception found anywhere in this research.

Hardware. Endpoints follow the standard commodity pattern (Dell, HP, Lenovo). Secure multifunction printers (Xerox, Canon, HP with pull-print/secure-release) are almost always leased through a local dealer rather than bought at list. Document scanners (Fujitsu/Ricoh ScanSnap, Kodak Alaris) are retail-priced, consumer-adjacent hardware.

Software. Practice management is the single most transparent category identified in this entire report — Clio, MyCase, and PracticePanther all publish per-user monthly pricing directly, no quote required. Document management is the hard pivot: iManage, NetDocuments, and OpenText — the systems firms actually store client matters in — are sold as multi-year enterprise contracts with no public price anywhere. E-discovery is the most uniformly opaque category found in this entire research pass: RelativityOne, DISCO, Everlaw, Casepoint, Exterro, and OpenText Axcelerate all display "request a quote" or "get a demo," with zero dollar figures, confirmed directly against each vendor's own pricing page. Email and endpoint security (Microsoft Defender, Mimecast, Proofpoint) runs through the standard reseller channel and tends to get weighted heavily given attorney-client privilege exposure.

Cloud. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace both publish full per-seat pricing, and legal-specific compliance add-ons (Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Premium) are bundled straight into the published E5 tier rather than priced separately. Cloud-native document management (NetDocuments, iManage Cloud) and cloud-delivered e-discovery (RelativityOne, DISCO, Everlaw) both kept the enterprise-negotiated pricing of their on-prem predecessors — moving to the cloud changed delivery, not the sales motion.

Bottom line for legal buyers: practice management is a five-minute purchase decision you can make from a pricing page. Document management and e-discovery are procurement projects. Don't assume the quick, self-service signup you got for your practice-management tool will repeat when you go shopping for a DMS or an e-discovery platform — it won't.

How to Use This When You're Actually Building a Budget

Sort every line item on your IT budget into one of three buckets, and treat each one differently:

• You can get a real number today, no sales call required — budget it from the calculator and move on. AWS and Azure (self-service calculators), Microsoft 365 (E3 $39, E5 $60/user/month) and Google Workspace, Shopify and most e-commerce platforms, Square/Toast POS hardware and software, Clio and most practice-management SaaS, CrowdStrike's SMB self-service tiers.
• A list price exists, but the real number comes from a reseller — get quotes from two or three channel partners and negotiate the discount tier. Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet and most enterprise networking gear; Zebra and Honeywell scanning hardware; Veeam, Commvault, and Rubrik backup software; Panasonic Toughbook and other ruggedized hardware.
• No number exists until a vendor scopes your specific deal — start the sales conversation months before you need the answer, not weeks. Every core banking platform (Temenos, FIS, Finastra, Finacle, Mambu, Thought Machine, Oracle FLEXCUBE, TCS BaNCS); every MES vendor (Siemens Opcenter, Rockwell Plex); enterprise ERP at scale (SAP S/4HANA, Oracle); every PLM platform (PTC Windchill, Siemens Teamcenter); every e-discovery vendor (RelativityOne, DISCO, Everlaw, Casepoint, Exterro); legal DMS (iManage, NetDocuments); enterprise storage (Dell EMC, NetApp, Pure Storage, Huawei); Bloomberg and Refinitiv market data.

The practical consequence: your annual budget cycle should have two different lead times built into it, not one. Horizontal infrastructure can be priced the week you write the budget. Vertical software needs its sales cycle started the quarter *before* you write the budget, or the number simply won't be ready when you need it.

Where Managed IT Fits Into a Stack Like This

No company in any of the four industries above buys a single vendor's worth of hardware, software, and cloud and stops there. A mid-size financial firm alone might be running Dell endpoints, Cisco networking, a core banking platform, Microsoft 365, AWS or Azure, CrowdStrike, and a backup platform — each on its own renewal cycle, support contract, and, as this report shows, its own pricing logic entirely. Reconciling that sprawl — negotiating the quote-only vendors, managing the reseller-channel hardware refresh, and keeping the publicly-priced cloud spend from drifting month over month — is most of what a managed IT services engagement actually does day to day.

Brocent works across all four of these verticals in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, and the pattern in this report shows up constantly in client conversations: teams are comfortable evaluating AWS or Microsoft 365 pricing on their own, and want a partner specifically for the parts of the stack that don't come with a price tag — vetting a core banking or MES vendor's quote, right-sizing a security services contract against actual risk rather than list price, or coordinating a hardware refresh around a broader office move. If any part of your own stack fits that description, Brocent's own pricing is published, and the fastest way to get a second opinion on a vendor quote is to just get in touch.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do some enterprise software vendors refuse to publish pricing at all?

Vertical, industry-specific software is priced against variables that differ wildly by customer — transaction volume, connected-asset count, or data volume under review. A single published flat rate would either overcharge small buyers or undercharge large ones, so vendors default to a sales-led, workload-scoped quote instead.

Is quote-only pricing a sign a vendor is overpriced?

No. It's a sign the product is sold through relationship-based enterprise sales rather than self-service, and that the true cost genuinely varies by deployment scope. Some quote-only vendors are competitively priced once negotiated — the opacity is about the sales motion, not necessarily the cost.

Which category is the most consistently public-priced across all four industries?

Cloud infrastructure and productivity software. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace all publish detailed, self-service pricing across every industry in this research, with no exceptions found.

Which category is the most consistently quote-only across all four industries?

Core, vertical line-of-business software — the system a company actually runs its operations on. Core banking platforms, MES software, and e-discovery tools were the three categories where every major vendor researched was quote-only, with zero exceptions.

Does company size change whether a vendor publishes pricing?

Not for vertical software. A large bank and a small regional lender both get a sales conversation from Temenos; a solo-practitioner firm and a large law firm both get "request a demo" from Relativity. Company size affects the number you're eventually quoted, not whether a number is published up front.

Should a budget cycle treat vertical software the same way it treats cloud spend?

No — this is the most practical takeaway in this report. Cloud and M365 spend can be estimated to the dollar from a public calculator the week you're writing the budget. Vertical software (core banking, MES, ERP, e-discovery) needs a real sales cycle built into the timeline well before that, because the number simply doesn't exist until a vendor scopes it against your specific deployment.

Where does managed IT support actually add value in procurement decisions like these?

Mostly in the categories that don't come with a price tag: vetting whether a quote-only vendor's proposal is fairly scoped, negotiating renewal terms on reseller-channel hardware and security software, and making sure publicly-priced cloud spend doesn't quietly creep month over month. A managed IT partner earns its keep specifically where self-service pricing runs out — which, as this report shows, is most of what actually runs your business.

*This report draws on Gartner's 2025 IaaS market-share release, ABI Research's manufacturing execution system competitive assessment, Gartner's 2025 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms, IBS Intelligence's core banking Sales League Table, and direct verification against vendor pricing pages across all four industries.*