Three things you can buy, one price at a time, and everything that is not in the licence — set out so you can check it before you ring anybody.
There are three things you can buy, and you only ever pay for one of them. Each one includes everything below it.
All three are priced per deployment. One running instance of commvita is one licence, and the rate is set by the staff or the population that instance serves. Not per site, not per seat, not per organisation on the contract — and every environment is included: production, test, training and disaster recovery.
| What you buy | What it costs | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| commvita Flow Edition | £1 per Commvita Flow Edition instance, a year | The open platform and the operational products. One flat fee for the deployment, whatever it serves. |
| Governance & Assurance | from £75 per member of staff, a year, falling to £50 | Everything you are inspected on — incidents, board papers, risks, training, information governance. Includes the Flow Edition. |
| Population Platform | from £4.50 per head of population, a year, falling to £1 | The clinical record across every setting. Includes Governance & Assurance, and the Flow Edition. |
On top of whichever one you buy there are three costs, and they are the same whichever it is: getting it in, connecting it to your other systems, and keeping those connections working. Those are set out below.
If you start on the Flow Edition and later move to Governance & Assurance, and later again to the Population Platform, you pay the Population Platform price and nothing else. You are not charged three times for the same thing.
An organisation with 2,000 staff serving a population of 75,000 pays £150,000 a year for Governance & Assurance. If it then takes the Population Platform it pays £337,500 a year — and that figure includes Governance & Assurance and the Flow Edition. It does not pay £150,000 plus £337,500.
Because the rate follows the deployment, two organisations that run one shared instance are one licence, banded on their combined population. Two organisations that run an instance each are two licences, and each one starts again at £4.50.
That is a real difference in price, and it is the right way round. Take a population of 1,000,000 and one of 2,000,000:
| How it is deployed | Licence | Why |
|---|---|---|
| One shared instance serving 3,000,000 | £5,950,000 | One instance, banded on 3,000,000 people. |
| Two instances, one each | £8,150,000 | £3,200,000 + £4,950,000. Each instance is banded on its own population. |
The gap is £2,200,000, or 27% — and it is earned rather than negotiated. To get the lower price you have to genuinely consolidate: one record, one set of integrations, one thing to upgrade, one thing to run. Nobody gets it by asking for a different contract.
It also runs the safe way round for us. Splitting a deployment costs more, not less, so there is no version of this where an organisation saves money by fragmenting — and if a shared instance is later separated, the licence goes up. That is worth saying at the point of signing rather than at the point of separating.
It is not always worth doing. Two organisations whose populations add up to 200,000 or fewer are both inside the first band already, so sharing a deployment saves them nothing on the licence — £4.50 a head either way. Below that line, consolidate for the clinical and operational reasons or not at all. The saving only starts once the combined population passes 200,000.
What still needs pinning down: how the population a deployment serves is counted. The registered population of the bodies it covers, or the number of people whose records it actually holds, are different numbers, and on this table the difference is money. It also needs a rule for people who appear in two deployments — they should be counted once by whoever holds their record, not by both.
Both of the priced tiers get cheaper as you get bigger, and they work the same way income tax does. You pay the top rate on your first people, a lower rate on the next lot, and so on down. The lower rate applies to the people in that band, not to everybody.
| Staff | Rate on those people | Works out at, by the top of the band | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| up to 5,000 | £75 | £75 | agreed |
| the next 5,000 | £65 | £70 | proposed |
| the next 10,000 | £57 | £63.50 | proposed |
| everyone above 20,000 | £50 | falls towards £50 | agreed |
| Population | Rate on those people | Works out at, by the top of the band | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| up to 200,000 | £4.50 | £4.50 | agreed |
| the next 300,000 | £3.50 | £3.90 | proposed |
| the next 500,000 | £2.50 | £3.20 | proposed |
| the next 1,000,000 | £1.75 | £2.48 | proposed |
| everyone above 2,000,000 | £1 | falls towards £1 | agreed |
4 of these rates are agreed and 5 are still a proposal. For staff the policy sets the top and bottom — £75 down to £50 — and not the two rows in between, so those are marked proposed and should not be quoted yet.
The population table tapers over 5 bands rather than 2,000,000 being a cliff edge. The three middle rates are the proposal. They hold more of the price through the range most single organisations sit in, and reach the floor later. £1 is charged from 2,000,000 people up, and a population of 1,000,000 works out at £3.20 a head rather than £2. That is the trade the middle rows make, and the reason they are not agreed yet.
Charge one rate across the whole organisation and crossing a line costs a fortune. A population of 200,000 at £4.50 would pay £900k. A population of 200,001 at £3.50 would pay about £700k. One extra person would cut the bill by £200k, and a finance director who spots that will manage the number rather than the service.
We tried holding the price flat until the lower rate caught up. That fixed the cliff and created a worse problem: populations of 200,000, 250,000 and 300,000 all paid the same, so 100,000 people were free and nobody could explain that to the customer at 200,000.
Banding it the way tax works settles both, and it settles them by arithmetic rather than by a rule anybody has to remember:
Counts are rounded to the nearest 100, so nobody re-quotes over one leaver.
Because the bands are marginal, £1 is the rate charged on everyone above 2,000,000 — it is not what a system of that size divides down to. A population of 10 million pays £12.95m, which is £1.29 a head. At 60 million it is £62.95m, or £1.05 a head.
Under a taper that gap is wide, so here is where each round figure per head actually starts. If somebody has been promised a rate, this is the population it begins at.
| All-in cost per head | First reached at a population of | Bill at that point |
|---|---|---|
| £3 | 1,160,000 | £3.48m |
| £2.50 | 1,933,334 | £4.83m |
| £2 | 2,950,000 | £5.90m |
| £1.50 | 5,900,000 | £8.85m |
The gap is wider on staff: £50 is the rate on everyone above 20,000, and an organisation of 30,000 works out at £59 a head. This is why the tables above carry both numbers — the rate on those people, and what the bill comes to.
Whichever tier you are on, the licence includes maintenance of the core system — keeping commvita itself running, patched and up to date. You do not pay a separate maintenance fee for the platform.
Connections to your other systems are different. Every deployment connects to a different set of things, so each connection is built for you and charged for, and then maintained and charged for. That is the one recurring cost on top of the licence.
| Cost | How much | When |
|---|---|---|
| Implementation | £30,000 – £200,000 | Once. Depends on the size of the population and how complicated your setup is. Governance & Assurance usually lands at the lower end, because it needs fewer connections. |
| Each connection to another system | £5,000 each | Once, per connection. |
| Keeping those connections working | 25% of what the connections cost | Every year. Four connections cost £20,000 to build and £5,000 a year to keep. This is on the connections only — maintenance of commvita itself is in the licence. |
| Hosting | Nothing from us if you host it yourself. If we host it, what it actually costs plus a 10% management fee. | Every year, and only if you want it. |
Everything on this page assumes you host it yourself, in your own cloud account or your own data centre.
All four assume four connections to other systems and self-hosting. The first-year figure is a range because implementation is a range.
2,000 staff · 4 integrations · self-hosted
| Licence, including core system maintenance, every year | £150,000 |
| Integrations, once | £20,000 |
| Implementation, once | £30,000 – £200,000 |
| Maintenance on integrations, every year | £5,000 |
| Every year after the first | £155,000 |
| First year, all in | £205k – £375k |
This is the example in the policy: 2,000 staff at £75 each. Everything they are inspected on, plus the Flow Edition underneath it.
2,000 staff · a population of 75,000 · 4 integrations · self-hosted
| Licence, including core system maintenance, every year | £337,500 |
| Integrations, once | £20,000 |
| Implementation, once | £30,000 – £200,000 |
| Maintenance on integrations, every year | £5,000 |
| Every year after the first | £342,500 |
| First year, all in | £392k – £562k |
They add the clinical record for their population of 75,000. The licence goes from £150,000 to £337,500 — not to the two added together. Their existing connections are already built and already maintained.
1 integration · self-hosted
| Licence, including core system maintenance, every year | £1 |
| Integrations, once | £5,000 |
| Implementation, once | £30,000 |
| Maintenance on integrations, every year | £1,200 |
| Every year after the first | £1,201 |
| First year, all in | £36,201 |
The licence is a pound. Everything else on the invoice is getting it in and connecting it up, which is true of any platform. It is not free and we do not describe it as free.
20,000 staff · a population of 1,000,000 · 12 integrations · self-hosted
| Licence, including core system maintenance, every year | £3,200,000 |
| Integrations, once | £60,000 |
| Implementation, once | £30,000 – £200,000 |
| Maintenance on integrations, every year | £15,000 |
| Every year after the first | £3,215,000 |
| First year, all in | £3.31m – £3.48m |
Both size discounts apply. The population figure is the higher of the two, so that is what is paid. This one depends on a proposed rate, so treat it as an illustration rather than a quote.
One thing on this page still needs a decision, and it is listed here rather than buried because it changes what somebody would be invoiced.
The middle of both tables. The top and bottom rates are agreed; the rows in between are a proposal. Those rows cover the 15,000 staff between 5,000 and 20,000, and the 1,800,000 people between 200,000 and 2,000,000. Move a proposed rate by a pound and an annual bill moves by up to £15k on staff and £1.80m on population. It moves for every customer above that band too, not only the ones inside it. Nothing in those bands should be quoted until they are signed off.
Prices exclude VAT. Nothing on this page is a quotation. Figures are computed from the pricing model in this repository rather than typed, so a change to policy changes this document, and a rate marked proposed has not been agreed by anybody.