How we price

Why the prices are what they are.

You should not have to buy the version of Specify you might need in three years in order to use the one you need now.

How the ladder works

Five plans, one ladder.

The workflow is the part that compounds, so no plan meters it.

Five plans, from €29 a month. They differ by how many people need access, how many storefronts you run, and what the bundled transaction fee is. Every one of them includes the whole store, from catalogue to checkout, and the whole specification and decision workflow. The workflow is the part of this product that compounds, because it learns what your business can actually do, and metering it would make the product worse for everyone on it.

The upper rungs are what fund the engineering, and that is the deal: a business answering difficult demand at volume pays for the infrastructure a business just starting out gets to use.

The least expensive system is not always the lowest-cost decision.

A difficult customer request may involve commercial judgement, technical constraints, supplier information, pricing authority and operational risk. Handling it well requires more than producing a plausible answer, and a plausible answer treated as an approved one is more expensive than no answer at all.

The ladder is priced so that the infrastructure, people and continuing development behind the commercial process are funded by the businesses getting the most out of them. A business at the entry rung is not being subsidised out of charity; it is early, and the point of the ladder is that it can start.

The price should stay reasonable relative to the commercial value and operational importance of the requests being handled. If it does not, for your business, that is a real answer and the fit section below is there to help you reach it quickly.

What the price buys

Four things that are expensive to do properly.

Each of these is a place where the cheap version and the good version look identical in a demonstration and diverge completely in production.

Infrastructure

Recoverability, replication, safe deployment, monitoring, security review and load testing are not features a customer sees. They are the difference between a system that handles a commercially important request and one that handles it until the day it does not. The subscription funds an infrastructure programme designed to meet a high production standard rather than the minimum that runs.

What it funds

Infrastructure built to a high production standard, with recoverability, monitoring and controlled deployment
Testing, security review and the operational safeguards that make a commercial answer trustworthy

People

Important commercial decisions require capable people as well as capable software. The price funds people across commerce, consulting, engineering, design, implementation, testing and security who are dedicated to improving the platform and the commercial experience. It does not buy you an individual assigned solely to your account, and we will not describe it that way.

What it funds

People who understand commerce, implementation and customer experience, not only software
Engineering and product development, rather than a thin layer over somebody else's model

Models

Model quality is not a matter of buying the newest or most expensive one. Interpretation, extraction, classification, retrieval and validation have different requirements, and the technically strongest model is not always the safest or most suitable for a given step. We invest in capable models and use them selectively, according to the requirements of the task.

What it funds

Access to capable models, selected for the task rather than for the headline

Depth in your kind of business

The platform improves by learning from repeated request patterns, common constraints, sector terminology, implementation experience and the decisions merchants actually make. Your subscription supports continued development for the commercial problems faced by businesses like yours, while each merchant's confidential information stays governed by access and data controls. Nothing confidential is shared between merchants.

What it funds

Continued development for the commercial problems businesses like yours actually have

And one thing that only works collectively

Part of the subscription goes toward bringing capable merchants, producers and specialists into the network. Over time that means broader represented capability, better specialist coverage and more responsible alternatives available to a difficult request. Part of the value is individual. Part of it comes from helping build a stronger commercial network around difficult demand. The network is a long-term direction rather than something operating today.

What it funds

Onboarding the merchants, producers and specialists that make the network worth participating in

Some of the above is built and in use, and some is what the subscription helps build. The technical page separates them, and no part of this page describes something as operating that is not.

The transaction fee

We grow when participating businesses grow.

Specify charges a bundled fee on qualifying commercial value facilitated through the platform: 3.9% on the entry plan, falling to 2.1% on the highest published one. The purpose is to align incentives, and the fee falling as a business grows is the same alignment read from the other side.

A fixed subscription supports the product, the infrastructure and the people. The fee connects part of what Specify earns to commercial outcomes for the businesses using it. When Specify helps create more relevant opportunities and more responsible outcomes, Specify participates in a share of that value. Under the working definition on the pricing page, the fee applies to every order paid through your store's checkout, a standard catalogue sale as much as a configured one.

It gives us a direct reason to keep improving

How well customer intent is understood
How relevant the resulting opportunities are
How quickly and how well commercial decisions get made
How good the implementation is
How much capability the network can actually reach
Whether customers come back

The working definition is on the pricing page: What qualifying commercial value means.

Alignment is the intent rather than a guarantee. A percentage fee still leaves Specify with incentives that need governance: a clear definition of what qualifies, reporting you can check, and a way to dispute a line you disagree with. Those are on the pricing page because a fee without them is just a number we assert.

Fit

A whole store, for where difficult demand matters.

The entry price is low enough that it no longer tells you whether this is for you. Every plan is a whole store, so an ordinary catalogue can be sold on it. What differs is how much of the rest you will use. Here is how to tell quickly which side you are on.

Likely a good fit

Customer requests are high value, and losing one matters
Products are configurable, made to order, or governed by materials, dimensions and technical constraints
Enquiries and quotations currently involve substantial manual work
There is real demand beyond what the catalogue publishes
Most of what you sell is standard, and the requests it cannot answer end up in an email
Several stores, teams or specialists are involved in answering a request
You want the commercial knowledge in the business to improve over time rather than stay in people's heads

Probably not a good fit today

You need return labels, credit notes or shipping rates by weight or carrier now, which Specify does not have yet
You already run a store that works, and no request ever goes beyond its catalogue, so moving would gain you little
What you need first is a marketplace's shoppers, and Specify does not bring shoppers to a store
What you actually want is a chatbot on the product page
You want the specification side but have no appetite for structuring capability and constraints, which is real work

We are not trying to make this suitable for every merchant, and a low entry price is not an argument that we have. A standard catalogue is not on the second list: it can be sold on Specify. A business in the second list would be paying for something it cannot use yet, and would be right to say so.

Discounts

The list price is the price.

Discounts exist, they are for specific reasons, and each one is time limited with a defined price it returns to. A high list price that everybody negotiates away is not a price, it is a negotiating position.

Pilot partners

For early merchants contributing substantial product feedback, implementation learning or sector access. Time limited, with the reciprocal contribution written into the agreement rather than assumed.

Annual prepayment

In exchange for commitment and cash flow. This one is published rather than negotiated: twelve months for the price of 10.

Multiple storefronts or entities

Structured pricing where several storefronts or business units join under one agreement.

Defined pilot

A reduced price for a narrow, time-limited pilot with a written scope, success criteria and the price it converts to afterwards.

The rules that apply to all of them

Every discount has a stated reason, an end date and the price it returns to.
Renewal moves back toward the list price. A permanent bespoke price is not called a discount.
Comparable businesses get comparable treatment.
Approval gets stricter as the reduction gets larger, and nobody has unlimited authority.
A discount is not used to avoid a conversation about whether the value is really there.

There are no crossed-out prices, countdowns or expiring offers anywhere on this site. If a price is reduced for you, the reason and the end date are in your agreement.

Start where your business is.

Specify is meant to become one of the most capable and dependable ways to answer demand beyond the fixed catalogue, and to be reachable by a business long before it can afford to be ambitious about software.

Create your store See the plans