Since then, a number of customers have reached out to us to ask us if this will have any impact on the price of MIDAS.

The short answer is no!

As you may be aware, we’re a UK-based business. Whilst President Trump is levying a 10% tariff on the UK, the newly announced tariff plans apply only to physical goods traded between countries.

The tariffs do not apply to services, which include sectors such as banking, finance and legal services.

Our booking system, MIDAS, is a software product. We do not supply physical or tangible goods – we supply a software service.

As such, the recently announced tariffs by the US do not apply to the supply of our software.

Consequently, the price of our software remains unchanged. In fact, we haven’t raised our prices now in over 5 years!

It remains to be seen what wider global impact the tariffs announced by President Trump will have on economies around the world.

However, as it stands today (which at time of writing is 3rd April 2025) – we have no plans to increase our pricing as a result of the tariffs announced in the US yesterday.

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As part of our research, we were quite surprised at the number of vendors who didn’t display pricing information for their software anywhere on their websites.

In fact, out of the 72 vendors we analyzed, 31% of them didn’t display pricing on their websites.

Of the 22 vendors who didn’t publish pricing, 10 actually made no reference to the cost of their software at all!

The 12 remaining vendors encouraged those interested in purchasing or subscribing to their software to instead contact them for a price.

Why do some software vendors not display any prices on their websites?

There are a number of reasons why a software vendor might choose not to display prices on their website:

1. Their software is customized for each customer and the price will depend on the specific requirements of the customer.
2. The software is sold through a network of resellers or distributors. The final price will depend on the specific terms and conditions agreed upon between the vendor and the reseller.
3. The software is offered on a subscription basis. The price will depend on the length of the subscription and the number of users.
4. The vendor is trying to create a sense of exclusivity or scarcity around their product. They believe that by not displaying prices they can generate more interest and demand.
5. The vendor gives different pricing deals to different customers. If they think they can get away with charging certain customers more than others for the same product/service, they won’t publish pricing on their website.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these…

The software is customized for each customer

All of the software vendors we looked at offered standard “off the shelf” software solutions. By this, we mean that the exact same software product is supplied to multiple customers. Whilst some vendors may offer additional one-off bespoke customizations, there were no indications that any vendor supplied each and every customer with bespoke software.

Here are MIDAS, we don’t understand therefore how this could be a justification for not displaying prices.

Whilst we ourselves occasionally do the odd bespoke customization for customers, any such customization is an additional cost. It does not affect the basic price of our software, and doesn’t prevent us from displaying prices.

The software is sold through resellers

Out of the 72 software vendors we analyzed, we could only find one who didn’t sell their software directly to customers through their own website. Instead, for this vendor a “How to buy” link on their website led to a “Find a local reseller” form.

All other vendors sold directly to end-customers themselves.

Therefore, aside from the one vendor who sells through resellers, this shouldn’t be a reason for other vendors to hide their prices.

The software is offered on a subscription basis and has different pricing tiers

Some subscription based software is offered at a fixed monthly or annual price for all customers. Other vendors may adopt a simple “tiered” approach – offing perhaps a very limited “Basic” package to start with. Followed by “Standard” and “Pro” packages at increasing cost.

Other vendors may offer a wider range of prices based upon specific criteria. For instance, when it comes to booking or scheduling software solutions, the price may depend on the number of bookings that can be made over a given period of time.

However, even if there are multiple pricing points, this shouldn’t be a barrier preventing a vendor from displaying prices. If pricing is dependent upon the number of bookings, users, spaces, etc, it’s not that difficult for a vendor to provide a calculator on their website. That way, customers can see the price they’ll pay for their specific service configuration.

Creating a sense of exclusivity by not displaying prices

By not displaying any publicly visible prices, prospective customers are then forced to make contact with the vendor. This initiates a dialog to between prospective customer and software vendor. During the dialog, the vendor can employ sales tactics to “hook” the prospective customer and convince them that their software is both right for them and they’re getting a great deal.

Giving different “deals” to different customers

Some software vendors may even “inflate” their prices depending upon the type of customer. For example, if a vendor thinks that a particular organization is likely to have a big budget, they may feel that they can get away charging that customer more for the same product that they typically charge another customer with a limited budget.

If the vendor was to display pricing on their website, they wouldn’t be able to arbitrarily charge different prices to different customers.

By not displaying any prices, this gives the vendor the ability to vary the price of their software at will. The customer has no “base price” to reference the price they’re quoted back to.

Ultimately, the decision to not display prices on a website is primarily a marketing and sales strategy. Software vendors may have a variety of reasons for choosing such this approach.

How we approach pricing at MIDAS

Here at MIDAS, we’re totally transparent and upfront about the pricing of our room booking & resource scheduling software.

We clearly display pricing on our website at mid.as/pricing. There’s also a “Pricing” link at the top of every page of our site too.

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It’s a brand-new year – in fact, it’s a brand-new decade – and we’re starting 2020 with an update to the pricing model for new cloud hosted editions of our MIDAS room booking and resource scheduling software.

We’ll explain more about that in a moment, but first a little background into the history of our pricing structure…

A Brief History of MIDAS Pricing…

When we launched the first versions of MIDAS way back in 2005, “hosted” applications (also known as “SaaS” or “Software as a Service”) were few and far between.

Initially, in the very early planning stages of MIDAS, we envisaged our software being something that customers could download and run on their own web servers.

In those days, our software was charged at a one-off fixed price for everyone. It quickly became clear however that there was also a demand for a “hosted” MIDAS solution in addition to a “downloadable” one.

Introduction of a “cloud hosted” software solution

We subsequently introduced a “remotely hosted” option. This was charged at the same one-off initial price as the “downloadable” version, but with an additional small “annual subscription” element. The subscription element covered the cost of hosting.

This worked well for the first five years. We were always conscious though that larger organizations, such universities with dozens – if not hundreds – of users and rooms were paying the same price for our software as the smallest of Churches with just a handful of rooms and a single administrator.

We didn’t think this was very fair. In an effort to address this in 2011 we introduced a “lite” version of MIDAS. This cut-down budget version didn’t include many of the advanced features – such as invoicing – that the full version had.

MIDAS “Lite”

MIDAS “lite” partially addressed this imbalance, but we still didn’t feel it went quite far enough. There were still some small organizations who didn’t have many rooms or users. But because they still wanted to use the invoicing features of MIDAS, they were forced to go with the “full” version of MIDAS.

That’s why in August 2012, we completely reworked our pricing structure. Gone was the “lite” version of MIDAS. Instead, we offered only the “full” version, but with a tiered pricing structure based on the number of “venues” (rooms/bookable spaces) to be managed and number of user accounts required. This went on to make MIDAS far more accessible to organizations of all shapes and sizes, and has served us well for over 7 years.

Throughout this time, the cost of MIDAS – whether “cloud” hosted or “self” hosted – still consisted of an initial one-off cost (i.e. “buying” the software), and an annual subscription element. The subscription element covering software updates and priority support was optional for “self hosted” customers. For “cloud hosted” customers, the subscription covered hosting, software updates, and support.

However, the rise of SaaS applications has sky-rocketed over the past 7 years. It’s now common place to find businesses which offer access to their application(s) for a flat monthly or an annual subscription fee, without having to ever “buy” the software itself.

We’ve also heard from our own customers, some of whom were put off by the initial high “one off” cost element when “buying” a cloud-hosted edition. Some of our customers would instead prefer to pay a simple monthly or annual subscription fee.

We’ve listened and that’s why from 1st January 2020 our pricing structure for new customers is as follows:

New & Existing Self-Hosted Customers:

There is no change to the pricing model for new or existing self-hosted customers. Pricing remains an initial “one time” cost (i.e. you’re “purchasing” the software). We still offer an entirely optional Annual Support Subscription, which provides access to software updates and Priority Support.

Existing self-hosted customers who wish to migrate over to a cloud-hosted system, would need to purchase a new cloud-hosted subscription, and contact us to arrange for existing data/settings from their previous self-hosted system to be migrated across.

New Cloud-Hosted Customers:

The cost of MIDAS no longer includes an initial “one time” cost element. Instead, simply priced monthly and annual subscription plans are now offered.

In essence, new cloud-hosted customers are no longer “buying” MIDAS, but rather “renting” it on a monthly/annual basis.

Comparative illustrative USD pricing example for a Cloud-Hosted MIDAS system (1 user / 10 venues) over 3 years:

Addons & Upgrades for new Cloud-Hosted Customers:

Under the previous pricing model (pre 2020), optional addons and upgrades for cloud-hosted customers typically involved a single one-time cost. Under the new pricing model (2020 onwards), upgrading your license or adding addons will affect your subsequent monthly/annual subscription price. A small pro-rata charge would be levied in the interim.

Existing Cloud-Hosted Customers:

We greatly value our existing and loyal customers, many of whom have been with us for years. We have no plans to move existing cloud customers onto the new cloud pricing structure.
Cloud-hosted customers who purchased MIDAS prior to 1st January 2020 will continue to see familiar Annual Hosting + Support renewal prices. These will in most cases work out lower than annual subscription prices for comparable new systems purchased from 2020 onwards.

There are no changes to addon/upgrade pricing for existing Cloud-Hosted customers who purchased MIDAS before 2020.

In summary, we hope that these improvements to our cloud-hosted MIDAS pricing structure will help make our software accessible to even more businesses and organizations, even those on the tightest of budgets. Gone is the initial high “one time” cost outlay, and instead we’ve introduced simple and straight forward low monthly and annual subscription pricing.

If you have any questions over the new cloud-hosted pricing model, please feel free to reach out to us, and we’ll be happy to assist!

In the meantime, we’d like to wish you a very happy and prosperous 2020!

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As you may be aware, we are a UK based business. Consequently, our “base” pricing is in Pound Sterling (GBP).

However our customer base is global, with around 70% of our customers residing outside the UK.

Because of our global reach, we also accept payment in a variety of other currencies too. This includes Australian Dollar (AUD), Canadian Dollar (CAD), Euro (EUR), and US Dollar (USD).

As our core pricing is referenced back to Pound Sterling (GBP), our systems routinely retrieve daily the current exchange rates between GBP and each of the other currencies we support. We obtain our exchange rates from the ECB (European Central Bank). We then use this data to automatically adjust the prices you see on our website. This occurs each day and for transparency, we display the date & time when the exchange rates were last updated.

This may mean that if you view international (non-Sterling) pricing on our website on any given day, and then check back another day the prices may have changed from those listed upon your initial visit.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the prices you’ll see on your return visit will be higher. In fact, in many cases they may be lower! Indeed, since the UK voted to leave the EU back in June last year, our non-Sterling prices have been on average 10% lower than they were before 23rd June 2016.

We’re committed to fair and transparent pricing. Our core Sterling pricing for MIDAS has remained fixed for a number of years now and has not been raised as a result of the UK’s decision to leave the EU.

However, due the wider instability and uncertainty in global markets that have become more prevalent in recent times, as a result of – for example, Brexit and the Trump presidency – this had tended to mean that our international prices have fluctuated a little more day to day than they have done previously.

Therefore, for the benefit of all our customers, we’ve now introduced a small improvement in the way that our systems automatically adjust our international (non Sterling) pricing each day.

Increasing Exchange Rate Stability

Instead of using the current exchange rates on each specific day itself in isolation, our systems now take an average of the daily exchange rates over the previous 7 day period. Effectively, we’re now using a “rolling 7 day average” to adjust our international prices.

This helps smooths out and reduce small price fluctuations you may see on our website from day to day!

We also know that many organizations require a formal fixed-price quotation. We’re very happy to provide quotations upon request. The prices given on these quotations would be fixed for a period of 30 days. Please contact us for a quote today if interested!

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It’s the start of a brand-new year, 2017, and so usually it’s around this time that many businesses quietly put up their prices…

Well, not here at MIDAS!! As you may know, we’re a UK based business, and not only have we held our 2016 prices for UK customers going into 2017, but given the short term fluctuations in value of the British Pound since the UK’s decision to leave the EU back in June, our prices for non-UK customers today are actually around 14-20% LOWER than they were at this time last year!

So there’s really never been a better time to get MIDAS! Make it your new year’s resolution to get your organization’s scheduling and room bookings back on track in 2017 with MIDAS!

What’s more, in 2017 we’re extending private trial periods of our software. Most who first explore a private trial of MIDAS and go on to purchase determine that MIDAS is right for them within their two-week private trial period (in addition of course to our public demo of MIDAS – which has no time limit). However, we appreciate that due to the extensive range of capabilities of our software, some customers prefer a little longer to be able to fully explore the features that MIDAS has to offer.

That’s why in 2017 we’re increasing the length of the trial periods we offer from 14 to 30 days!

If you’re considering MIDAS as an alternative to your current room/resource scheduling system, you can activate a free no-obligation 30 day trial here.

2016 marked our 10th anniversary, and we hope to bring you more exciting updates to MIDAS throughout 2017!

We hope 2017 is a prosperous year for you and your business, and we’d love to get MIDAS working for your organization and make your life easier in 2017 and beyond…

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The primary reason for this change is to ensure fairness for all our customers. We also want to facilitate greater access to our software to a wider audience. Under the previous “fixed price” pricing structure, a small organization with one administrator and a handful of rooms was paying the same price for MIDAS as a large organization with dozens of administrators and hundreds of rooms. To us, this didn’t seem fair!

The idea behind MIDAS “Lite”

That’s one of the reasons why last year we introduced a “cut-down” version of MIDAS, that we called MIDAS Lite. MIDAS Lite was designed to cater for smaller organizations and those on tighter budgets. MIDAS Lite was limited to 10 bookable spaces and a single user. It also didn’t include functions such as Statistics or Invoicing.

Replacing MIDAS “Lite”

With the release MIDAS v4, we’ve dropped our “Lite” edition of MIDAS, and changed our pricing structure. Now, the price you’ll pay for MIDAS will depend upon both the number of bookable spaces (venues) you wish to manage, and the number of user accounts required.

The new basic price for MIDAS will allow for a single user and up to 10 venues. This is similar to the previous limits that MIDAS Lite had. The new basic price includes all the features and functions of MIDAS (including Invoicing, Statistics, and Public Booking Requests, etc)

If you have more than 10 venues, or require multiple users have access, pricing options are available to meet your needs. You can also upgrade at any time to more venues/users. So as your business develops and grows, MIDAS can grow with you!

There are also “Unlimited” options available for both Venues and Users. Unlimited licenses remove limits on the number of venues and/or users you can add to your MIDAS system.

Our support/subscription pricing structure will also be updated to reflect the number of venues/users in your MIDAS.

How these changes will affect existing users

If you purchased MIDAS before 1st August 2012 and have a valid Annual Support Subscription, you’ll be entitled to a FREE update to MIDAS v4!

Users of MIDAS Lite will be entitled to upgrade to MIDAS with 1 user and 10 venues. These are the same limits you had in MIDAS Lite.

If you were using the full edition of MIDAS v3, there were no restrictions on the number of venues/users you could add to your system. For MIDAS v3 users, the same unlimited restrictions will apply when you update to MIDAS v4!

That’s right, existing customers will not have any limits imposed on the total number of venues/users they can add to MIDAS v4!.

We care a great deal about our existing customers, many of whom have been with us since the start! That’s why there will also be no increases in “Annual Support” or “Hosting + Annual Support Subscriptions” for existing customers! In fact, around 30% of existing customers (those with few users/venues) will actually find that their Annual Support/Hosting Subscriptions will decrease upon their next renewal!

We believe our new pricing structure, coinciding with the major new release of MIDAS v4, will be fairer for all. It will help make MIDAS more accessible to all organizations whatever their size!

As ever, we remain totally transparent and upfront about our pricing! Unlike many of our competitors who don’t display their pricing on their websites, our prices are always plainly shown at https://mid.as/pricing.

If you have any questions about our new pricing structure, please feel free to contact us.

UPDATE: Our cloud-hosted pricing model was subsequently updated again in 2020

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