The Hidden Costs of a LIMS: What to Know Before You Buy

Think the cost of a LIMS is just the subscription quoted in a demo?

Here’s the not-so-hidden secret about LIMS pricing: the annual contract price isn’t the total cost of the LIMS. In fact, for many vendors, it’s well below the total cost of ownership. And for legacy vendors, these hidden costs are often major drivers of revenue!

Some, like implementation costs and premium support, are necessary to get value from your LIMS. But others, like custom development work, are far from required if you choose the right platform.

We’ve yet to meet a lab with ample budget for all these hidden costs, so in this article, we’ve tabulated all of the “hidden” costs that can be added to a LIMS, with advice on how to navigate them and ensure your investment is ROI-positive.

What Does a LIMS Cost?

This actually isn’t the easiest question to answer.

For one, most vendors gate their pricing behind a sales call rather than publish it publicly. There are pros and cons to this – no doubt some vendors truly do need to customize their pricing for each lab – but either way, the end result is an opaque market that is hard to compare.

Secondly, even if those vendors published their pricing, it wouldn’t account for all the extra costs that come after signing. These are the “hidden costs” we’ll explore later on in this guide.

All that being said, there are a few figures we can share to give a view of the market in broad strokes:

• Lower-end: At the lower end of pricing, you’ll find cloud-hosted SaaS LIMS that have lighter customization capabilities and requirements for services. Typically in the $10,000 - $25,000 range, these LIMS may be a good budget-conscious choice, but often require more workarounds on your part to adapt to them.
• Middle-range: In the mid-range platforms, you’ll find more advanced features like configurable automation, API access, and inventory management. QBench, Genemod, and Cloud LIMS are good examples of the offerings here. At this range, you’ll often find platforms ranging from $25,000 - $50,000.
• Higher-end: Legacy vendors typically price for large enterprises, resulting in contracts over $50,000, and sometimes the total cost of ownership can be as high as $100,000 - $200,000 when you factor in training, development, and implementation costs. 

‍Check out our guide to LIMS pricing here. If you’re keeping score, that’s a range from around $10,000 to $100,000+ per year. Are you getting 6x the value in those larger legacy LIMS? Not exactly. We’ll cover the factors that drive costs next.

What Factors Influence the Cost of a LIMS?

Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room here: a price range that itself is six-figures wide needs a bit of explanation. 

Here are the factors that can influence the base cost of a LIMS:

• Number of users: LIMS are data-intensive platforms. The more users you have, the more data you need to store, and the more you will need to pay. Note: Some vendors allow for shared logins (think like Netflix), but there are pluses and minuses to this, as it can throw off your ability to support private views or user-specific data. 
• Cloud vs on-prem: On-prem may seem like an attractive way to save on a monthly subscription, but it is not the most cost-effective solution. In fact, on-prem systems require high ongoing maintenance costs of around 25% of capital costs annually.
• Features: Want access to automation, a customer portal, or advanced analytics tools? Many vendors require a higher pricing tier to access some advanced features, which can add to the cost of your contract. Note, though these features inflate costs, they may lead to a stronger ROI. More on calculating this later.
• QMS access: Some LIMS offer a built-in QMS, which can streamline your audit process but will add to the cost of the platform. Again, you’ll need to compare the cost of a LIMS + QMS versus a cheaper LIMS and a separate QMS. You may find the pricier LIMS is actually more cost-effective.

That can explain the variance between the lower-end prices of $15,000 per year and the middle range of $30,000, but to get north of six figures, you need to factor in the added costs that won’t be included in the annual subscription fees:

• Implementation and training: You can’t avoid implementation, and it’s not necessarily a cost you want to avoid. But implementation will factor into the first-year cost of your LIMS, and some vendors charge quite a bit for it.
• Pro services: This is where things get especially costly for labs. While the “if you can dream it, we can build it” offering from legacy LIMS sounds attractive, in reality, that dream isn’t free. Many legacy vendors charge thousands for even the simplest changes.

To complicate matters even further, vendors may shorten the implementation timeline intentionally to offload costs later. That means that while one vendor’s implementation process might be “faster” and “cheaper” than another, it’s important to verify whether this means more advanced customization will be needed later on for an additional fee – or if the cheaper options allow for any customization at all.

It’s the pro services that make LIMS six-figure expenses, and for that reason, we don’t blame you for having sticker shock from legacy LIMS in the past. While implementation costs are necessary, continued development and pro services are optional – if you go with the right vendor. 

Before you start thinking that a custom-built solution could avoid these, be warned that even a home-grown system can cost tens of thousands of dollars in maintenance and updates. Case in point, one lab we spoke with used the same custom LIMS for 35 years. Simple enough, except that it was built in a programming language no one but one developer knew, and that same developer was planning to retire and put a stop to all changes. Between the cost of this developer’s time, the back-and-forth over change requests, the workarounds, and the need to hire external help, the costs easily run into the hundreds of thousands.

Or beyond custom development, what about the not-so-obvious costs associated with wasted time? Many labs we speak to spend hour after painstaking hour manually generating the same worksheets or reports, often working around the limitations of their software. In wasted manpower, this too can easily rack up tens of thousands in costs.

We call this series of hidden costs, service fees, and added complexity the “complexity tax” that you will find with legacy vendors. In the next section, we’ll show you how to avoid it.

How to Minimize These Hidden Costs: Watch Out For the Complexity Tax of Legacy LIMS

We can’t speak for every vendor out there, but we can speak for QBench. The best way to avoid these hidden costs is to avoid the “complexity tax” that comes with legacy LIMS vendors.

Let’s start with the software subscription costs. 

QBench, billed annually, starts at $275/month (our Foundation package) per user with a five-user minimum. That means your total cost per year starts at $16,500, which includes all the features you’d need and more from a LIMS, including:

• Sample management tools
• Barcode scanning
• Access to our automation engine
• Configurable worksheets
• Reporting tools

Our Foundation package is a good start for labs taking their first steps to digitize operations, but labs primed for scale tend to flock to our Growth package ($325/month) or our Advanced package ($425/month) to access everything QBench has to offer.

These higher tiers give you access to powerful features and data-intensive tools like:

• File parsing
• A configurable customer portal for external and internal customers
• API access
• Inventory management access
• An integrated QMS
• Billing and invoice management
• Dropbox integrations

Training costs tend to hover around $5,000, while pro-services and implementation will vary based on your lab size, needs, and complexity. 

This puts QBench squarely in the “middle range” of LIMS pricing, but here’s where QBench really stands out: thanks to the configurable nature of QBench, you will need to rely on our pro services team far less than you would a legacy LIMS, making it more cost-effective in the long run. 

QBench supports in-app configuration and no-code automations, meaning that with a bit of training, anyone on your staff can log in and adjust a worksheet or COA, automate a process, or generate a report in seconds. 

No custom dev work. No waiting four weeks for minor changes. No $4,000 invoices for tweaks from an engineer. While we do offer pro-services and training as needed, we believe in building a platform that allows you accomplish more on your own time, not come up with workarounds or pay for extensive services. 

How to Know if a LIMS is Worth the Investment

Whether you go with a configurable, modern LIMS like QBench, a legacy vendor, or a custom-built system, at the end of the day, securing budget approval comes down to ROI.

You’ll only get approval if you can demonstrate the LIMS is “worth it,” which means you need to be able to calculate the costs of the LIMS (total costs, not just the subscription price) and the return, usually in the form of cost savings or increased output from your lab.

To get you started, here are a few cost drivers to consider:

• Size of your lab and the number of seats needed
  
  • Roles for those seats, you may get by with view-only seats for a lower price
  • Same with shared logins and impact on costs
• LIMS subscription costs
• Training and implementation costs
• Any other pro-services needed for configuration/customization

And for the return:

• Time saved by staff and admins
• Capacity increases and associated revenue
• If you’ve been audited because of data integrity issues, factor in the costs there

And then it’s a matter of tabulating the costs compared to the return in terms of capacity and savings. For example, consider the following numbers for an in-house lab that generates a return in the form of time saved:

• The staff includes 10 techs and two admins
  
  • The estimated annual salary for each tech is $60K per year
  • The estimated annual salary for each admin is $120K per year
• The lab processes 80 samples per day
• Technicians spend about 7 hours processing samples per day
• The LIMS saves techs 5–6 hours per week and admins 6–7 hours per week (this is the low-end estimate of what our customers have told us a modern LIMS saves them)

Then let’s say that a LIMS could drive the following outcomes:

• 50-60 total technician hours saved per week for the 10 technicians
• 12-14 total admin hours saved per week for the two admins
• Increased capacity for 57 more samples processed each week. We’re assuming the above technicians are not so busy babysitting spreadsheets that they can get more important work done.

In terms of time saved across the 10 techs and two admins, this results in a savings of $111,000 to $132,000 each year. When we account for the cost of QBench (roughly $42,000 for a lab this size), we get an ROI range of 164% to 213% (or 2.6x to 3.1x)! The lab could then invest these savings into more headcount or other areas of the business to generate an even larger return. 

You can learn more about calculating the ROI of a LIMS in our in-depth guide here.

Looking for the Right LIMS? Download the LIMS Buyer’s Guide

There’s a sliding scale on the total cost of a LIMS, but no matter which vendor you choose, it will be an investment on your part.  That cost is worth it – if you have the right LIMS.

With so many vendors to pick from and features to consider, we created a LIMS buyer’s guide to help you make the right choice for your lab. In this guide, you will learn the following:

• The different types of LIMS available
• Key features to look out for
• A vendor comparison

And more!

Fill out the form below to get your free guide and take the first step toward automating your lab today.