What UK small businesses pay for software in 2026: 30 list prices

A 10-person UK service firm on eight common tools pays £6,659.40 a year at list price, before VAT. The stack below assumes 10 office users, 4 people who sell, 3 who answer support tickets and 2 who send contracts. All eight prices are in pounds on the UK pages.

That is £6,659.40 ÷ 10 = £665.94 a head a year. Six of the eight lines bill per person, so the total grows with every hire. At 20 users and the same proportions, the per-seat lines roughly double while Xero and Mailchimp stay flat.

Billing monthly instead of annually adds £540 a year on three of these lines alone. Calendly costs 4 × (£10 − £8) × 12 = £96 more, Zendesk 3 × (£20 − £15) × 12 = £180 more, and Google Workspace Business Standard on its £14 flexible plan 10 × (£14 − £11.80) × 12 = £264 more.

A heavier CRM changes the picture fast. Four seats of HubSpot Sales Hub Professional at $90 a seat a month cost 4 × $90 × 12 = $4,320 a year, before the one-time $1,500 onboarding fee HubSpot's page lists, against £1,872 for four Pipedrive Growth seats.

List prices are the right basis for a yearly budget, because the headline offers end. Xero, QuickBooks and Sage each showed 90% off for the first 6 months to new customers. FreshBooks showed 50% off for 3 months. Google Workspace showed 50% off for 3 months from 20 November 2026.

A worked example shows the effect. Xero Grow at 90% off for 6 months costs (6 × £3.90) + (6 × £39) = £257.40 in the first year, then £468 every year after. Budget £468.

• VAT. Most UK pages quote prices before VAT. Squarespace includes estimated VAT, and Zoom adds any VAT in the cart before checkout. A VAT-registered business can usually reclaim the VAT, so compare on the pre-VAT figure.
• Currency. Ten of the 30 tools showed only dollars to a UK visitor, and n8n showed euros. Zapier's page says it charges in US dollars and converts other currencies at the rate on the payment date, so the pound cost of these lines moves with the exchange rate.
• Billing period. Annual plans are cheaper but lock you in. Asana Starter costs £11.59 billed monthly against £8.49 billed annually, 37% more. Zapier Professional costs $29.99 against $19.99, 50% more.

Yarigai starts by listing what a business pays for, then builds only where the payback is clear. Its founder replaced 10 of the team's own subscriptions with tools Yarigai built, saving about £3,600 a year (£301 a month).

Yarigai also sells the source code of four apps it built for itself, to run on the buyer's own Cloudflare account. Yarigai Recorder replaces Loom, Yarigai Scheduler replaces Calendly, Yarigai Docs replaces DocuSign and PandaDoc, and Yarigai Review replaces Frame.io. Details are on the open source page.

For client work, Yarigai builds inside the client's own accounts, and the client owns the code, the data and the accounts from day one. A one-week blueprint, credited to the build, puts the maths in writing before the client pays anything. It sets out what the system replaces, what that costs a year and what the build costs. Yarigai quotes a fixed price after that blueprint. The homepage example is a $500 a month tool, which costs $6,000 a year, plus 10 hours a week of admin at $20 an hour, which costs $10,400 a year. If the build doesn't come out ahead within the first year, Yarigai doesn't take the job. The build or buy guide walks through the same test.