The GTM Stack Cost Index

Every vendor publishes a price and almost nobody publishes a total. The number a team needs is not what one tool costs, it is what the stack costs once the fifth, eighth and eleventh tool have been added and each one is billed on a different basis. That number was not available anywhere, so we counted it.

The index is computed from the lowest published paid tier of every go-to-market tool we keep a comparison page for. It is the price of getting in the door, not what a team ends up paying once seats and add-ons land. Per-seat and flat-rate tools are reported separately throughout, because a median that mixed them would be averaging a per-person fee with a whole-company one, and would mean nothing.

The finding that surprises people is not the headline total. It is the spread. The gap between the cheapest and the most expensive entry tier inside the same category is routinely an order of magnitude, which makes the category average a useless planning number, and most stack-cost estimates are built on one.

Every figure is derived from the comparison pages rather than typed in, so it moves when the underlying pricing is updated. A hardcoded number on a page headed statistics is the exact thing that goes quietly stale and then gets quoted for years.