If you take one thing from this site, take this: the amount in a federal contract award is not the price of the software named in it.
It is a number, it is public, and it is about the product. It is still not a price. Almost every confident claim you have read about "what government pays for X" is built by ignoring that distinction, and it is why those claims disagree with each other so violently.
What the number actually is
An award record says: this agency, on this date, obligated this much money to this recipient for the work described here. That is all. The amount is a contract total — the value of one purchase, for the scope of work the description sets out.
"Scope of work" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The same platform, bought by two agencies in the same month, can appear as:
- a licit per-seat subscription for a 200-person team;
- an enterprise-wide agreement covering every employee of a department;
- a three-year renewal of an entitlement bought before the current contracting officer arrived;
- a bundle where the platform is one line among several vendors' products;
- an implementation project in which the licences are almost incidental to the labour;
- a modification that adds funding to a contract signed two years ago without buying anything new at all.
Six different things, six wildly different amounts, one product name. Average them and you get a number that describes none of them. Publish that average as "the government price" and you have published a fiction with a citation attached, which is worse than publishing nothing.
How to tell which kind of number you are looking at
This is where a site either does the work or pretends the problem away. Our method is to label every figure with what it is, and to refuse to compare across labels:
contract_total— the value of one award. What most of this site's records are.unit_price— a price per unit stated in the award text, e.g.(10) @ $2013.00 EA. Quoted, not computed.derived_unit_price— no rate is stated, but the text states a quantity, so the total is divided by it. We show the quantity we used and call the result derived, because it depends on our reading of the text.list_price— the vendor's own published price. Not what anyone paid. Comparable only with other list prices.
The fourth is the one people get wrong most often. A vendor's list price is a starting position in a negotiation, and public agencies rarely pay it — they buy through schedule contracts and reseller agreements at a discount that is itself commercially confidential. So when you see a page that sets a list price next to a contract total and invites you to compare them, you are looking at two numbers that were never meant to meet.
The test to apply to any pricing claim
Ask three questions of any figure you are shown about public-sector software:
- What kind of number is it? If the answer is not stated, assume the worst.
- What was bought? If the award text says "software support renewal, per attached", the amount is not evidence about a licence, and no amount of arithmetic will make it one.
- How many records is it drawn from? One award is an anecdote. Three is a floor. A band with a count next to it, and the scope of the records it was computed from, is the only shape in which this information is honestly reportable.
Everything on this site is built to survive those three questions. Where the evidence cannot survive them, we do not publish a figure — and where it can survive them only partly, we say so in the sentence that carries the number.