Pricing
Silas™ has no published price.Here is what actually drives one.
Nobody in this category publishes a price, and we are not going to pretend we do either.
What we can do is answer the question underneath it. What capture and proposal tooling is priced on. What it costs you beyond the invoice. And the six questions that force two vendor quotes into a shape you can actually compare.
If you only read one line: the licence is rarely the expensive part. The expensive part is the staff time on either side of it, and almost no pricing conversation starts there.
How much does Silas cost?
Silas has no published price today.
There is no self-serve signup and no billing. It is delivered as an engagement, and a number is quoted against scope rather than picked off a tier card.
Three things move that number most: how many opportunity lanes you want watched, how much of the proposal workload moves into the system, and how much company-profile work has to happen before any of it produces useful output.
We could put a plausible-looking number here and it would probably generate more enquiries. But we sell a system whose central promise is that it refuses to state figures it cannot support. Publishing an invented price while selling that would be self-refuting. So there is no number.
Why does nobody in GovCon publish pricing?
Because in this category price is set by scope, and scope varies enormously between a two-person firm bidding four times a year and a division running a proposal shop.
Vendors also gate pricing because a published number invites comparison against a competitor selling a different bundle. That is a real commercial reason and not a scandal.
It does mean the burden is on you to force quotes into a comparable shape, which is what the checklist below is for.
| Product | What is published | What you have to do | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| SamSearch | No figure published, but the drivers are: seats and modules, with read-only stakeholders free (checked 2026-09-07). | Book a demo. A buyer still cannot see a number without talking to sales, but they can see what it will be built from. | Parity |
| Deltek GovWin IQ | No pricing published on the product site (checked 2026-09-07). | A “Try GovWin IQ for FREE” route and a contact path. A price comes from a conversation. | Parity |
| Silas | No published price and no tiers. | No self-serve signup and no billing at all. A quote is scoped in a conversation, and we say so on this page rather than behind a form. | Parity |
Everyone in this comparison gates the number, and the better ones now tell you what it is built from. So here is ours, plainly: scope, not seats alone, and an onboarding engagement priced separately from the software. You will get both figures in the first conversation, not the second.
What drives the price of GovCon capture software?
Five things drive the price of government contracting capture tooling: market coverage, seats, how much document processing you do, whether proposal drafting is included or sold separately, and implementation.
Federal-only coverage is cheaper than federal plus state, local and education.
The fifth is the one that is routinely underestimated, and it is usually paid in your own staff time rather than on the invoice.
- Market coverage. Federal-only is a different product from federal plus state, local and education, and a different product again if Canada is in scope. This is usually the largest single lever, and it is the one where buying more than you need is most common.
- Seats. Capture leads, proposal managers, pricing, contracts and the executive who wants the dashboard are all different usage patterns. Ask whether read-only review access costs a full seat. For many teams the reviewers outnumber the authors.
- Volume of document work. Reading a hundred-page solicitation, extracting requirements and generating drafts consumes real compute. Some vendors bundle it, some meter it. A bundle with a soft cap is a bill you have not seen yet.
- Where the product stops. A search-and-alerting product and a system that carries you through compliance, pricing basis, drafting and the audit record are priced differently because they replace different amounts of labour.
- Implementation. Anything that compares a solicitation to your company needs your company written down first: certifications, clearances, registrations, wrap rates, past performance. That work is real, it is usually yours to do, and it rarely appears on the quote.
What does capture tooling cost beyond the licence?
Three costs that do not appear on any quote, in the order they usually surprise people.
The third dwarfs the other two, and it is the only one worth optimising for.
- Setup labour. Budget real hours for writing down what your company holds. If a vendor tells you there is no setup, ask how their tool knows whether you clear a facility clearance requirement. The honest answer is that it does not.
- Review labour. A generated draft you have to read line by line for invented figures is not a seventy-percent saving. Ask what the tool does when it cannot support a claim: does it flag, does it soften, or does it stop? Those three answers are three different review budgets.
- The wrong bid. A bid pursued that never had a chance costs a proposal team weeks. A bid skipped that you would have won costs the contract. Any tooling decision that does not measure itself against these two is optimising the cheap end of the problem.
What should you ask every vendor to make quotes comparable?
Six questions. Ask all of them of every vendor including us, and write the answers side by side. Most quotes in this category are not comparable until you do, because each vendor bundles a different slice of the work.
- What exactly is a seat, and do reviewers need one? → so that the quote does not double at rollout when the contracts team needs access.
- Which markets does this cover, and what does adding one cost? → so that a later move into state and local is a known number rather than a re-procurement.
- What happens when the tool cannot support a claim it is asked to write? → so that you learn now whether your review burden is a skim or a full verification pass.
- Run the same document twice. Is the output identical? → so that you know whether a compliance judgement can be defended to a reviewer, or only re-generated and hoped over. This takes thirty seconds and almost nobody asks it.
- What do I get out if I leave, and in what format? → so that your requirement matrices and decision history are assets you own rather than hostages.
- What does implementation actually require from my staff, in hours? → so that the go-live date on the quote is one your team can actually hit.
The fourth question is the one we would most like you to ask us, because it is the only claim on this site that a sceptic can verify in the room rather than take on trust.
What is a Silas engagement scoped against?
Three variables, and a conversation rather than a form. How many opportunity lanes you want watched, how far into the proposal workload you want the system to reach, and how much of your company profile already exists in writing.
- Lanes watched. The federal sources are swept often regardless; what varies is how many distinct capability profiles are being scored against → so that a firm with one lane is not priced like a division with six.
- Depth into the proposal. Qualification and compliance only, or through pricing basis and drafting → so that you are paying for the part of the pipeline that is actually costing you bids.
- Profile readiness. If your certifications, clearances, registrations and past performance are already written down, setup is short. If they live in three people’s heads, that is the first piece of work → so that the estimate reflects your actual starting position rather than an average one.
Before you spend a call on price, it is worth knowing whether Silas is even a candidate: the SamSearch comparison and the GovWin IQ comparison both open with the reasons you should buy something else.