In short
- The software licence is usually the smallest line in a first carbon reporting year.
- Internal hours are the largest cost and the one nobody puts in the business case.
- Assurance and product footprints are separate purchases. Budget them separately or not at all.
Budget for a first carbon reporting year in five lines, not one: the software licence, internal hours, external help, assurance if somebody demands it, and a contingency for the data that turns out not to exist. The licence is usually the smallest of the five. Most vendors will not give you a number before a call because their price moves on entities, seats and how much human help you buy, so a single figure would be wrong for most buyers. Size the internal hours first and the rest follows.
This page is a budgeting method rather than a price list. We sell a platform, which makes the licence line the one you should check hardest.
Where does the money actually go in year one?
Five lines. The order below is roughly how large they are for a first-time reporter, which is not the order most business cases put them in.
- Budget line: Internal hours
What it is: Pulling ledgers, chasing suppliers, cleaning categories, reviewing outputs
Typical size relative to the licence: Usually the largest line - Budget line: Software licence
What it is: The annual subscription
Typical size relative to the licence: Four figures for an SME plan - Budget line: External help
What it is: Onboarding, methodology review, scope 3 scoping
Typical size relative to the licence: Varies widely, quoted per project - Budget line: Assurance
What it is: Third-party verification, if a customer or scheme requires it
Typical size relative to the licence: Frequently larger than the licence - Budget line: Product footprints
What it is: LCA, EPD, MKI or PCF work
Typical size relative to the licence: A project, not a subscription
The pattern worth internalising is that the two lines you can look up, the licence and the free tier, are the two that matter least to the total. The two that decide whether the project lands on time are internal hours and the contingency.
Why will most vendors not tell you what it costs?
Because the answer genuinely differs by buyer, and because a call lets them size you first.
Of the vendors whose public pricing pages we read on 27 August 2026, EcoHedge was the only one publishing a plain annual figure, with a free forever Lite tier and Express Growth at GBP 990 a year. Coolset, Greenly, Watershed, Persefoni and Seedling published no numeric price on their pricing pages that day. Hedgehog publishes Pro from EUR 1,200 a year, on its G2 profile rather than in a quote.
None of that is dishonest. Enterprise carbon platforms price on some combination of seats, legal entities, emissions volume, supplier count and bundled services, and a single sticker price would misprice most accounts. It does mean that if you need a number for a budget round in three weeks, you should ask for it in writing in the first email rather than waiting for a proposal.
What should a single-entity SME budget?
Assume one legal entity, scope 1 and 2 plus a handful of scope 3 categories, and a customer questionnaire or a tender as the reason you are doing this.
Licence: four figures a year. The published tiers in this market sit around GBP 990 to EUR 1,200 for an entry plan. A free tier will genuinely get you a first organisational inventory. If a vendor quotes five figures for one entity, you are being shown an enterprise product you do not need.
Internal hours: budget a person for several weeks, spread over a quarter. Not full time, but not a Friday afternoon either. The work is finding data, not entering it.
External help: optional in year one. Most SMEs can get to a defensible scope 1 and 2 figure without a consultant. Scope 3 is where advice starts to pay for itself.
Assurance: only if somebody has actually asked. Do not buy verification speculatively.
What should a multi-entity mid-market company budget?
The shape changes because consolidation and governance appear as real work.
Licence: driven by entities and seats. Ask for the per-entity and per-seat rate explicitly, because that is almost always how the number is built, and get the year two figure in the same email.
Internal hours: a named owner, not a volunteer. Someone has to chase five sites for energy data every quarter. If that person is not named in the budget, the second reporting year is where the project quietly stalls.
External help: usually yes, and usually scoped. Scope 3 boundary decisions, a methodology review before an audit, or a base year restatement are the places where a few consulting days save a month. That is what carbon footprint consulting is for, and it is bought as a project.
Assurance: budget it separately and early. It is rarely inside a software price and it is frequently the larger of the two.
Which costs surprise people most?
Four, in the order we see them bite.
Integration work you assumed was included. Hedgehog has few integrations with other software today. A Mid-Market customer named exactly that on G2 in June 2026 as the thing they would change. If your plan depended on an automatic ledger feed, check that assumption before it is in the budget, with any vendor.
Categorising the purchase ledger. Spend data arrives as thousands of lines with no carbon attached. Mapping them is the single most underestimated task in a first year.
Year two. Carbon reporting is an annual routine. A first-year discount that resets changes the real cost materially, and the second year also carries the cost of restating anything you got wrong the first time.
Product footprints. If a customer asks for a footprint per product rather than per company, that is different work with a different price. At Hedgehog the platform does organisational footprints and product footprints are delivered as a service through LCA consulting. Buying a platform seat does not get you an EPD.
What does Hedgehog cost, and what does it not cover?
A free account with no sales call, and Pro from EUR 1,200 a year priced on user seats and business entities. The platform covers GHG Protocol setup, inventory building and reporting, with over 20,000 spend-based and activity-based factors, the ability to add organisation-specific or supplier-specific data, multi-entity management, and reporting outputs including the GHG Protocol, PPN 006 and the CO2-Prestatieladder.
The limit worth putting in your business case: it is not a broad ESG suite. A Mid-Market customer rated us 3.5 out of 5 on G2 in June 2026 and said that for broader ESG data and reporting, for example CSRD, the platform is less complete, with no data source management feature and no decarbonisation target monitoring. If your budget line is really an ESG programme rather than a carbon one, that changes what you should be pricing.
How do you build the budget in an afternoon?
Four questions, answered in this order, get you a defensible number.
- Who is asking, and for what artefact? A tender document, a customer questionnaire and a CSRD disclosure are different sizes of job.
- How many legal entities and sites are in scope? This drives both the licence and the internal hours more than anything else.
- Where does the spend data live, and who owns it? If the answer is four systems and three people, add contingency.
- Has anyone asked for assurance? If not, leave it out and revisit next year.
Then get the licence quote in writing with the year two price included, and put internal hours in the business case as an explicit line. A carbon budget that shows only a subscription fee is a budget that will be wrong.
If you want to size the data work before you size the spend, start a free account and build a first inventory from your energy and fuel data. Our general guide to choosing carbon accounting software covers what to test before you commit, and if you would rather talk it through, book a call.
Sources: vendor pricing pages for EcoHedge, Coolset, Greenly, Watershed, Persefoni and Seedling, read on 27 August 2026. Hedgehog platform and Hedgehog on G2, read on 27 August 2026. Prices move, so re-check before you commit a figure to a budget.
