Why we publish our pricing (and why most EDR vendors don't)
Most enterprise EDR platforms hide pricing behind a sales call. Here's why LightEDR publishes every tier openly - and what that means for your budget planning.
The “contact sales” wall
If you’ve ever tried to price a CrowdStrike or SentinelOne deployment, you’ll know how this goes. You fill in the form. A sales development representative calls within 48 hours. There’s a discovery call to “understand your requirements”. A demo. A scoping session. Eventually - after several weeks and a handful of meetings - you get a quote in a PDF with a 30-day expiry date.
That’s not a buying experience. That’s a process designed to capture information and control when you find out what something costs.
The EDR market is almost universally guilty of this. CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity, Defender for Endpoint via Microsoft licensing - they all require sales engagement before you see a number. Even vendors that publish pricing often bury it behind tiering complexity that requires a spreadsheet to decode.
Why vendors hide their prices
The reasons aren’t mysterious - they’re standard enterprise B2B playbook:
Price discrimination. A 5-person startup and a 2,000-seat enterprise have very different price elasticity. If you publish a single rate, you leave money on the table at the top and scare away buyers at the bottom. “Contact sales” lets you charge what each customer will bear.
Sales cycle control. Every interaction with a prospect is an opportunity to pitch, to upsell, to handle objections before they become blockers. Gate the price behind a human and you control the narrative.
Competitive opacity. If you can’t easily compare CrowdStrike to SentinelOne to Elastic Security on price alone, you’re forced to evaluate on features - where incumbents have years of marketing collateral to point at.
Bundling complexity. Enterprise EDR is rarely sold alone. Platform fees, API add-ons, extended retention, professional services - by the time you’ve unpacked the quote, the base price is almost irrelevant.
None of this is dishonest exactly. But it is deliberately opaque, and it advantages the vendor over the buyer every time.
What pricing opacity costs SOC teams
For an in-house SOC the cost is mostly time. Weeks of procurement cycles for a tool you’re not sure you’ll even get approved. Budget requests based on estimates that turn out to be wrong.
For MSSPs the damage is structural. You need to build service packages, set client pricing, and forecast margins. If your upstream EDR vendor won’t tell you what you’ll pay until after you’ve signed an NDA and sat through three calls, you’re pricing your services on guesswork. When the real quote arrives, your margin model breaks.
We’ve heard this from MSSP operators repeatedly. Not knowing vendor costs makes the whole downstream business harder to run.
Our approach: published tiers, nothing hidden
LightEDR publishes its pricing on the website. No form to fill in, no call required.
| Tier | Price | Agents |
|---|---|---|
| Free | £0 | Up to 5 agents |
| Standard | From £5/agent/month | Unlimited |
MSSP accounts get multi-tenant management under a single control plane - one dashboard, one billing relationship, all client environments logically separated. The per-agent rate is the same whether you’re managing 20 endpoints or 2,000.
There are no module add-ons to negotiate. AI-powered alert triage (supporting Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Gemini, and Ollama) is included. Zero Trust continuous verification is included. Ninety days of telemetry is included. You pay per agent, and that’s the whole bill.
We publish this not because we’re naive about commercial strategy, but because the buyers we want to work with - lean SOC teams, MSSPs building real businesses, security engineers who want to evaluate tools on their own schedule - deserve to know what something costs before they talk to anyone.
Why transparency is a feature, not just a policy
When you can look at a pricing page and immediately know what 50 agents costs, you can build a business case in an afternoon instead of a quarter. You can compare us to alternatives honestly. You can sign up for the free tier, deploy five agents in your lab, and form a view before a single commercial conversation happens.
That’s the deal we’re offering. Evaluate on your own terms, upgrade when it makes sense.
If that sounds like how you want to buy security software, get in touch - or just sign up and see for yourself.