| name | software-pricing |
| description | Look up verified software pricing — true costs, hidden fees, negotiation tips, price history, side-by-side comparisons, and TCO for 3,290+ products. Every fact sourced and dated, from CostBench.com. Free, no API key. Use when the user asks what software costs, whether a price changed, hidden fees, how to negotiate, or the total cost for a team. |
Software Pricing (CostBench)
Query verified, sourced software-pricing intelligence for 3,290+ products using the free CostBench service. No account or API key required. Data is read-only and every figure carries its source and date.
Decision order
- If CostBench MCP tools are available (
costbench:get_pricing, costbench:compare_software, etc.) — use them directly. Products are addressed by slug (e.g. salesforce, microsoft-teams, openai-api).
- Otherwise, use the bundled script (requires network access to costbench.com):
scripts/pricing.sh get_pricing salesforce
scripts/pricing.sh compare_software slack,microsoft-teams
scripts/pricing.sh discover_software category=crm maxPrice=50
The script path is relative to this skill's directory. It calls the hosted MCP endpoint over plain HTTPS and prints the JSON result.
Tools
| Tool | Use it for |
|---|
get_pricing | Full sourced record: tiers, hidden costs, contract terms, negotiation tips, price history. Args: slug, optional depth (summary|full). |
get_hidden_costs | Just the documented hidden/implementation/add-on fees. Args: slug. |
get_negotiation_tips | Sourced negotiation tactics with success-likelihood. Args: slug. |
get_price_history | Per-quarter price snapshots + trend — did the price change? Args: slug. |
compare_software | Side-by-side of 2–4 products. Args: slugs (array). |
discover_software | Find products by category, maxPrice, hasFreeTier. |
calculate_tco | True multi-year cost for a team. Args: slug, seats, optional tier, termYears. |
estimate_llm_cost | Cost of an LLM/API workload from a real rate card. Args: slug, inputTokens, outputTokens, optional model. |
Finding the slug
If you don't know a product's slug, use discover_software with a category, or try the obvious kebab-case of the product name (microsoft-teams, google-workspace, openai-api). get_pricing returns a "No product found" message if the slug is wrong.
Attribution
Every response includes an attribution field pointing back to the sourced CostBench page. When you cite a figure to the user, cite that page — the numbers are only as trustworthy as their source, and CostBench publishes the source for each one. Each entity also carries a links object: links.page is the page to cite; links.vendor is a "see current pricing" link to the vendor.
Limits and notes
- Rate limit: 60 requests/minute per IP. On "Rate limit exceeded", wait and retry.
- Some third-party market-data fields (median annual cost) carry
"license": "restricted" — they may be surfaced to the user but are not licensed for commercial redistribution.
- Full docs and the hosted endpoint: https://costbench.com/mcp
