Most care home software providers make it deliberately difficult to compare prices. This article puts the real numbers in one place. Per-resident costs, the modules that cost extra, a typical five-year total, and how bespoke development compares.
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Care home software is not a single product. It is a collection of modules that vendors sell together or separately. The headline price almost always covers the basics: digital care plans, daily notes, and basic reporting. Everything else, including electronic medication administration records (eMAR), staff rostering, family portal access, and advanced compliance dashboards, is typically an add-on.
Understanding this is the first step to comparing prices fairly. A system quoted at £150 per month and another at £450 per month are often not offering the same thing. Strip out the add-ons and they may be identical. Add the modules you actually need and the cheaper system may end up more expensive.
Most premium providers do not publish pricing publicly and require you to contact them for a quote. The table below shows what is publicly available or verifiable from published sources as of early 2026.
| Provider | Published Pricing | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Person Centred Software | Not publicly disclosed. Contact for quote. | Used by 8,000+ UK providers. The market's largest platform. Positioned as a premium system. Generally suited to larger care groups. |
| The Access Group | £3 to £24 per bed per month, depending on modules | Wide range reflects the modular structure. A full suite (care planning, eMAR, rostering, compliance) sits toward the upper end. |
| Nourish Care | From £195/month (flat rate for smaller teams) | 12-month minimum contract. Full feature access tends to be 50% higher than entry pricing once additional modules are added. Suited to both residential and domiciliary. |
| Birdie | From £200/month | Primarily focused on domiciliary and home care rather than residential. NHS-assured. Mandatory implementation packages required for providers with 300+ care recipients. |
| Careberry | From £150/month + VAT | No long-term contract. 3-month cancellation notice. Free onboarding and training included. More transparent pricing than most. |
| CareDocs | ~£1.20 to £2.50 per resident per month | A standalone care planning system. Lower cost and simpler to implement. Used widely by smaller residential homes. Not a full suite. |
| Log my Care | Free starter plan. Pro/Outstanding pricing on request. | Per active service user, not per bed capacity. eMAR, rostering, and family portal are paid add-ons. |
Take a 30-bed residential home. A realistic mid-range subscription with care planning and eMAR runs to roughly £350 to £600 per month. That is £4,200 to £7,200 a year in visible fees alone, and it may exclude rostering.
The monthly subscription is the visible part of the bill. Several expenses sit outside the headline price. A vendor buries them in small print, or quotes them after you sign a letter of intent.
Most platforms charge a setup fee. It covers configuration to your workflows, the import of your resident data, and the integrations you need. This varies from a few hundred pounds at the simpler end to several thousand at the more complex. Expect £500 to £2,000 for a straightforward residential home moving from paper or a simpler system. Data migration from an existing digital system is at the higher end of that range.
Initial training is sometimes included, sometimes not. Included training is often a single session. Most care teams need ongoing support through the first few months. Platforms that do not include training charge separately per session or per day. Budget another £500 to £1,500 for initial training if it is not clearly included in your quote.
eMAR (electronic medication administration records) is the add-on that catches most care homes out. It is a critical module for CQC compliance but frequently sold separately. Rostering is another common add-on. So is the family communication portal. Each additional module adds to the monthly cost. A system quoted at £3 per bed per month can reach £12 to £15 per bed once the modules you actually need are included.
Subscription software is repriced at renewal. It is common for the second and third year rates to be noticeably higher than the introductory contract. Systems that launch at £300 per month have been known to reach £500 to £600 by year two as features migrate into premium tiers.
Basic email or ticketed support is usually included. Phone support, dedicated account management, or priority response windows are often sold as premium add-ons. A software failure during a medication round or a night shift is a serious problem. The support tier therefore matters more than the initial quote suggests.
The NHS Transformation Directorate allocated £25 million across 2024 and 2025. The money reaches providers through Integrated Care Systems. It helps CQC-registered adult social care providers adopt digital social care records. This is real money that can offset a significant portion of the software cost for eligible providers.
The critical condition: the system you choose must be on the NHS Assured Solutions List. Birdie, Nourish, Person Centred Software, CareDocs, and several others qualify. If your preferred system is not on the assured supplier list, you cannot access this funding.
To check whether you are eligible and what is available in your region, contact your local Integrated Care System. The process involves applying through the DiSC (Digitising Social Care) programme, which also provides implementation support.
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A bespoke system built around your workflows costs £20,000 to £50,000 for a small or medium residential home. That is a one-off development fee. Larger homes sit at the upper end of that range or beyond it. Complex integrations and multi-site requirements drive the difference. Pharmacy dispensing systems, NHS GP Connect and third-party rostering are the usual ones. One bespoke system can replace several separate subscriptions. Care planning, eMAR, rostering and a family portal become one platform you own outright.
Our live care home demo opens without a login, and it covers the systems costed here. Sign in as a nurse and run a medication round, or as a family member and see the portal. It is a working system, not a screenshot.
That is a significant upfront number. But it changes the ownership calculation entirely. Once built, the system is yours. There are no monthly per-resident fees, no module add-ons, and no renewal negotiations. Your system is cloud-hosted on secure UK-based servers. Every change is recorded in real time, and you can also back up locally on a schedule. Ongoing costs are limited to maintenance, usually 10 to 15% of the build cost each year. That covers bug fixes, compliance updates and small changes as your workflows develop.
| Cost Item | Subscription (full suite, 30-bed home) | Bespoke (30-bed home) |
|---|---|---|
| Year 1 (build/setup + annual fees) | £7,000 to £11,000 | £20,000 to £50,000 |
| Years 2 to 5 (annual running costs) | £5,500 to £9,000 per year | £5,000 to £8,000 per year |
| Five-year total | £29,000 to £47,000 | £40,000 to £82,000 |
| What you own at year five | Nothing. Licence to continue paying. | The complete system, outright. |
| NHS DSCR funding eligibility | Yes, if on assured supplier list | No, unless separately accredited |
Over five years, the economics are closer than most managers expect. But there are two genuine limitations to bespoke in the care home context that the table above cannot fully capture.
A bespoke system does not automatically qualify for the NHS DSCR funding described above. The NHS assurance process is designed for established software platforms, not custom builds. Pursuing accreditation for a single-home bespoke system is costly and time-consuming, and most will not do it. Government funding may cover a large part of a subscription system's cost. That changes the bespoke calculation considerably.
Off-the-shelf platforms update their systems when CQC guidance, DSCR standards, or data standards change. With a bespoke system, keeping it aligned with evolving requirements falls to you and your developer. This is manageable, but it requires an ongoing relationship with whoever built the system.
The figures above cover a home that keeps the same shape for five years. Few homes do.
Add a service line, and your records system needs a new record type. Merge two teams, and it needs a new permission structure. Take on a new commissioner, and it needs a new reporting field. Each of those is a schema change in a traditional system. A new table, a migration, a test cycle and a release. Your supplier quotes for every one.
We build care systems on engage.re, which holds everything in five database tables. Those five never change. A new record type adds an entry to a shared dictionary instead of a table. Your new service line is therefore configuration rather than development.
Two other cost lines go with it. We do not charge per seat, so a new carer does not raise your bill. You can also host the system yourself, under a published conformance package, so a renewal price is not the only option you hold.
We set out the price-rise arithmetic in your software bill goes up every year. The seven questions to ask before you sign sit in vendor lock-in, what can you prove.
There is no universally correct answer. Four things decide the right system. How your home operates. Your budget position. Whether DSCR funding is available to you. What off-the-shelf inflexibility already costs you in staff time and workarounds.
Subscription software makes more sense for homes that:
Bespoke development makes more sense for homes that:
Whatever route you take, these are the questions that expose the real cost before you commit:
Getting written answers to these questions before you sign puts you in a much stronger position when the full invoice arrives.