ERP pricing: licences, implementation and the real budget

Of the vendors we checked, Odoo is the only one that gathers its exclusions into a list of its own: implementation, hosting for custom developments and in-app credits are not part of the subscription. NextUp never mentions implementation, migration or training on its price page, and SmartBill encodes them in the word Optional. On a system we build, the exclusions are third-party licences, hardware and the data your team prepares. One line is worth keeping: a vendor price page describes what you buy, not what it costs you to go live.

A two-person company pays SmartBill €16.32/month + VAT for stock management, that is €195.84 a year with no implementation; at that volume the honest answer is that you do not need an ERP. A distributor with ten users on Odoo Standard pays €249 a month with annual billing, €2,988 a year, or €311 a month with monthly billing, €3,732. Implementation is not included: our own service page estimates it at €5,000–20,000, while softlead.ro published €5,000–25,000 in June 2025; with an €8,000 implementation the first year reaches €10,988. On per-module licences, NextUp publishes licences and annual subscriptions as two separate lists, without stating whether the subscription is mandatory on top of the licence: three network modules — €1,920, €1,560 and €1,200, that is €4,680 — plus the Standard annual subscription of €298 per module, €894, plus SAF-T at €600 add up to €6,174 in the first year, excluding VAT and implementation.

At SmartBill the thresholds are documents and people: 30 invoices a month and one user on the entry tier, 100 invoices and three users on the next, and an additional place of business costs 60% of a subscription. At NextUp the threshold is single-station versus network, and Stock Management moves from €1,200 to €1,920. Calendar thresholds we publish separately: one to two months for a retailer starting with invoicing, stock and one warehouse, three to six months with procurement and field agents, six to twelve months for manufacturing with recipes and traceability.

First, VAT: a figure with no stated regime cannot be compared with one marked + VAT, and of the three vendors we checked only Odoo declares nothing at all on its Romanian page. Second, the unit of measure: per module, per user or per company; ask for the price converted into one unit. Third, what is included and what is not, with implementation, migration and training named explicitly. Fourth, the billing regime: the advertised price is usually the one with an annual commitment, and at Odoo monthly billing costs 24.9% more. Fifth, who owns the code and how you export your data. The figures are indicative and exclude VAT; a firm quote follows once we have seen the module list and the workflows.