There are 33 data-platform products on this site, and behind them sit 2,368 public contract awards worth $2,116,618,029. Every one of those records is a real thing that happened: an agency, a date, an amount, a vendor or reseller that received it, and a link to USAspending.gov where you can read it yourself.

We have now read all 2,368 of them. This is what they say.

Most of the money is licences, and most of the rest is a mystery

Classify each award by what its description says it bought, and the picture is less messy than the raw totals suggest. Licences account for 42 percent of awards, renewals for 25 percent. Together they carry $1,140,135,172 of the $2,116,618,029 — a little over half the money, on two-thirds of the records.

Then there is the remainder, and it is worth being blunt about it. Support-only awards are 10 percent of records, services 3 percent, training 2 percent, and genuine multi-product bundles another 2 percent. Each of those is a real purchase, but none of them is a price for the product it names. An award that buys three years of implementation labour and happens to mention the platform is not evidence of what the platform costs, and any site that averages it in is quietly wrong.

The largest single group after licences is also the least satisfying: 16 percent of awards — 369 of them — cannot be classified at all from their text. They say things like "software support renewal, per attached" and nothing else. We publish them, label them unknown, and leave them out of the headline figures, because the alternative is guessing, and a guess dressed as a price is the thing this site exists to avoid.

A handful of names receive most of it

Awarding agencies are what you would expect. The Department of Defense accounts for 712 of the 2,368 awards, Homeland Security 276, Health and Human Services 219, Transportation 174, Commerce 120. Forty-two agencies in total buy from these 33 products.

The recipients are more interesting, because they are mostly not the vendors. Carahsoft Technology Corp appears on 192 awards, New Tech Solutions on 141, Software Information Resource Corp on 119, Executive Information Systems on 106, GovSmart on 103, CDW Government on 94. Read the list and you are reading how federal software is actually bought: not from Salesforce or Databricks directly, but through a small number of resellers holding a schedule contract that an agency can order against.

That has a practical consequence for anyone trying to work out what software costs. The vendor publishes a list price; the reseller sells at a discount off it; the agency records the discounted total. The number in the public record is the third of those, and it is the only one that is public.

The largest files are the largest buyers, not the biggest prices

Ranked by total obligated value across licence and renewal awards, Tableau leads at $196,359,648, then Palantir at $182,043,748, Informatica at $110,922,920, Confluent at $105,402,245 and TIBCO at $79,472,559. Databricks, Elastic and MicroStrategy follow.

It is tempting to read that as a price ranking. It is not. It is a buying-volume ranking. A product at the top of that list is one that many agencies have bought many times, which is a statement about how widely it is deployed and how long it has been sold to government — not about what a licence costs. Tableau's file alone holds 738 awards; Palantir's holds 71.

The number that should worry a buyer

The single most useful figure on this site is not a price. It is the ratio between the smallest and largest award for the same product.

Tableau's records run from $397 to $13,047,776 — a spread of more than 32,000 times. TIBCO runs from $9,783 to $26,400,272. Microsoft Power BI from $404 to $734,755. SAS from $3,119 to $5,338,670. Informatica from $6,916 to $11,083,145.

None of those pairs is a contradiction. The small award is usually one team buying one thing; the large one is an enterprise-wide deployment with services attached, often recorded as a single line. But that is exactly the problem: a buyer who searches for "what does this cost" and finds one number will find the wrong one. The honest answer is a band, and this site now prints one at the top of every product page — computed only from licence and renewal awards, with the range and the count next to it so you can see how thin the evidence is.

What we can and cannot tell you

We can tell you, for 33 products, what public agencies have been awarded, when, from whom, and what the award text says was bought. We can tell you how that has moved, and we can hand you the whole dataset as CSV.

We cannot tell you what any of it costs per seat. Federal award text states a total far more often than it states a rate; of the 2,368 records here, only a minority state a per-unit price at all. Where an award does state one, we quote it. Where the text states a total and a quantity, we can divide — and we label the result as derived, with the quantity we used. Where neither is available, we say nothing, which is the correct answer more often than vendors and analysts admit.

Twelve of the 33 products have a published list price from the vendor. The other 21 are quote-only, so for those the only public price evidence in existence is the award record — and that is precisely why it is worth reading.