In short
- Of eleven vendor pricing pages checked, only two published a number.
- Published entry pricing sits between EUR 990 and EUR 1,200 a year.
- Quote-only pricing usually signals seat-based or emissions-volume-based enterprise pricing.
On 27 August 2026 we opened the pricing page of eleven carbon accounting vendors and looked for a number. Two had one. Everyone else asks you to book a call.
That is the honest answer to what this software costs: the market mostly will not tell you. This page sets out what we found, what the visible numbers are, and how to work out a budget when the vendor will not publish one.
We sell one of these products, so treat the section about us accordingly. The method is repeatable and you can check any row yourself in a minute.
What did we actually check?
Eleven vendors, one pricing page each, read on 27 August 2026: Coolset, EcoHedge, Emitwise, Greenly, Normative, Persefoni, Plan A, Seedling, SmartTrackers, Sweep and Watershed. We looked for a currency figure attached to a plan. Nothing more sophisticated than that.
One honest qualification on the method. For three of the eleven, Emitwise, Plan A and SmartTrackers, the pricing URL we held returned a 404 rather than a page. That is not the same as a vendor declining to publish a price, and we have marked those three separately below rather than counting them as quote-only. They may publish pricing somewhere we did not look.
- Vendor: EcoHedge
Publishes a number: Yes
Free tier: Yes, Lite - Vendor: Hedgehog
Publishes a number: Yes, on G2
Free tier: Yes - Vendor: Coolset
Publishes a number: No
Free tier: No - Vendor: Emitwise
Publishes a number: Pricing URL not found
Free tier: Not established - Vendor: Greenly
Publishes a number: No
Free tier: No - Vendor: Normative
Publishes a number: No
Free tier: No - Vendor: Persefoni
Publishes a number: No
Free tier: Yes - Vendor: Plan A
Publishes a number: Pricing URL not found
Free tier: Not established - Vendor: Seedling
Publishes a number: No
Free tier: Not confirmed - Vendor: SmartTrackers
Publishes a number: Pricing URL not found
Free tier: Not established - Vendor: Sweep
Publishes a number: No
Free tier: No
So what are the numbers that do exist?
EcoHedge publishes EcoHedge Lite as free forever and Express Growth at GBP 990 per year. Other figures appear on their pricing page, so check which tier a number belongs to before you rely on it.
Hedgehog publishes a free account and Pro from EUR 1,200 per year, priced per user seat and business entity. That figure is on our G2 profile rather than buried in a quote.
Persefoni offers a free tier, Persefoni Pro, but no published paid price. Seedling invites you to start for free without publishing a plan, a limit or a price, so we have recorded that as unconfirmed rather than counting it as a free tier.
So the visible entry point for a paid plan in this market is roughly EUR 990 to EUR 1,200 per year. Of the eight vendors whose pricing page we actually reached, six were quote-only.
Why do so few vendors publish pricing?
Three reasons, and only one of them is bad for you.
The pricing genuinely varies. Most enterprise platforms price on some combination of seats, legal entities, emissions volume, number of suppliers engaged and how much consulting is bundled. A single number would be wrong for most buyers.
The deal is partly services. A large share of what you pay in this market is people: onboarding, data cleaning, an assured figure at the end. That is quoted, not listed.
It is a qualification gate. A call before a price lets the vendor size the account first. Common, legitimate, and it costs you time.
The practical consequence is that comparing this market on price requires you to run a procurement process, and that most published comparisons of carbon accounting software contain no prices at all.
What should you actually budget?
Work from the shape of your organisation rather than from a list price.
A single-entity SME doing scope 1 and 2, plus a handful of scope 3 categories, to answer customer questionnaires or a tender. The published tier is the right benchmark: expect four figures a year, and expect a free tier to genuinely cover a first inventory. If a vendor quotes five figures for this, you are being sold an enterprise platform you do not need.
A multi-entity mid-market company with full scope 3 and a CSRD or VSME obligation. Seat and entity counts start to drive the number. Ask for pricing per entity and per seat explicitly, because that is usually how it is built.
Anyone who needs assurance. Budget the assurance separately. It is rarely in the software price and it is frequently the larger line.
Anyone who needs product footprints. An LCA, an EPD or a product carbon footprint is a project, not a subscription. Do not expect a platform seat to cover it. At Hedgehog that work is a service, and the platform does organisational footprints.
What questions get you a real number faster?
Ask these in the first email and you will skip two calls.
- What is the price for one entity and three users, per year, with no services?
- What changes that price? Seats, entities, emissions volume, suppliers, or something else?
- What is included in onboarding, and what is billed separately?
- Is assurance included, and if not, what do your customers typically pay for it?
- What happens to the price in year two?
That last one matters more than people expect. Carbon reporting is an annual routine rather than a one-off exercise (we cover how to pick a tool for that in choosing carbon accounting software), and a first-year discount that resets in year two changes the real cost materially.
What does the free tier actually get you?
Free tiers in this market are real but bounded. They are usually enough to build a first organisational inventory and see your own numbers, and not enough to run a full annual reporting cycle across several entities with multiple users.
That is the right way to use one. Build a first footprint, find out how bad your data actually is, and only then decide what you need to buy. Most of the cost in a carbon accounting programme is data work, not licence fees, and you cannot size the data work until you have tried it once.
Hedgehog's free account exists for that, and it does not require a sales call.
The short version
Two of eleven vendors publish a price. The visible entry point is EUR 990 to EUR 1,200 a year. Everything else in this market is quoted, and the quote is driven by entities, seats and how much human help you buy.
If you want to see your own number before talking to anyone, start a free account and build a first inventory.
Method: the pricing page of each named vendor was read on 27 August 2026 and checked for a numeric price. Vendors change pricing pages often, so re-check before quoting any figure here.
