Reading a training vendor's price page

Training platforms are unusually quiet about price. Of the twelve platforms on this site, four publish business prices, one of them without a clear unit, and eight publish none. That makes the published prices worth reading carefully, and it makes the questions you put to quote-only vendors more important.

What do the published prices say?

On the pages we read:

• Conducttr publishes four crisis exercise licences: Raven £11,950, Hawk £16,465, Osprey £21,000 and Eagle £25,725 a year, each for up to 40 participants per session, in GBP excluding tax. Its Assessment Toolkit is priced separately from £4,536 a year, and larger exercises are quoted.
• Hack The Box publishes its Professional plan at $250 per seat per month or $2,500 per seat per year; its other business plans are not priced publicly, and Crisis Control has no published price.
• KnowBe4 publishes US list prices for two awareness tiers, per seat per month on a 3-year term: SAT Foundation from $2.40 for 25–50 seats down to $1.63 for 501–1,000 seats, and SAT Advanced from $3.75 down to $2.79. Above 1,000 seats is quoted, and add-ons such as PhishER Plus are priced per seat.
• TryHackMe publishes a free individual tier and paid individual plans, and lists business plans at $99 and $199 per month; we could not confirm whether those are per user or how they are billed.
• BreachRx, Cloud Range, Cyberbit, Cytactic, iluminr, Immersive Labs, Reflex Security and SimSpace publish no price on the pages we read. Cyberbit's /pricing address and Reflex's /pricing address both returned a 404 when we checked.

What do prices leave out?

Look for the unit and the limits. A licence priced per year may cap participants per session, as Conducttr's do. A per-seat price may cover labs but not a tabletop product on the same platform, and a low monthly seat price may assume a multi-year term, as KnowBe4's published prices do. Add-ons change the total: Cyberbit sells Crisis Sim 360 only as an add-on to a Cyberbit Readiness plan, so the executive exercise cannot be bought on its own. Measurement can be separate too, as with Conducttr's Assessment Toolkit.

What should you ask quote-only vendors?

Ask the same questions of every vendor, in writing:

1. What is the unit: per seat, per participant, per exercise, per team or a flat platform fee?
2. What is included at that price: which training types, how many exercises, which reports?
3. What costs extra: add-ons, custom scenarios, facilitation, integrations with your tools?
4. Is there a minimum term or minimum number of seats?
5. What does a pilot or proof of concept cost, and does it convert into the contract?

How should you treat vendor cost claims?

As claims. TryHackMe, for example, states its tabletop exercises are 56% more affordable than the average consultancy tabletop exercise. That may be true for some buyers, but the baseline is the vendor's, not yours. Compare against your own last consultant quote or your own internal preparation time.

How do you compare quotes fairly?

Build a one-page grid with the five answers above for each vendor, plus the time your own people will spend per exercise or per week. A cheaper licence that needs more preparation or facilitation can cost more in total. The platform fact grid shows which platforms publish what.

What next?

The next track is about running a programme. Lesson 6 covers turning training records into evidence an auditor or board will accept.