Why We Charge for Our Pilot Program (and What You Get for It)

Every SaaS company you're evaluating right now offers a free trial. We don't, and we want to tell you exactly why, instead of burying the reasoning in a pricing footnote.

A free trial is cheap to offer because it's usually cheap to deliver. You get a login, a mostly empty instance, and a countdown clock. Whatever you learn about the product in those fourteen days is whatever you had the time and expertise to figure out yourself, on top of your actual job.

The Pendravo Pilot Program is a different kind of offer. For a flat, one time fee ($2,500 for up to 10 agents, $4,500 for 11 to 25), we personally configure your instance, import your real data, and run two live training sessions with your team. Then you get a genuine evaluation window, roughly four weeks, to use it for actual day to day work, with support from us during business hours, before you decide on anything longer.

That's real work on our side, done by hand, by a small team, before you've paid for anything beyond the Pilot itself. Charging for it isn't a way to make you commit early. It's the honest price of the setup and attention a real evaluation actually requires.

Here's the part we say out loud, more than once, because it's the part that usually hides in fine print elsewhere: the Pilot fee doesn't carry forward as a credit or a discount if you continue on a standard plan. You'll pay our full, published price starting on day one of that plan, the same as any other customer. We'd rather tell you that up front than have it be a surprise at the exact moment you're deciding whether to trust us with more of your operations.

Why not just discount the Pilot fee against a future contract, the way a lot of onboarding fees work elsewhere? Because that discount has to get paid for somewhere, usually by raising the standard price for everyone, or by quietly not doing the setup work as thoroughly as we say we will. We'd rather keep the two numbers separate and honest: this is what real onboarding and evaluation cost, and this is what the ongoing platform costs. Neither one subsidizes the other.

If you're comparing us to a free trial elsewhere, ask yourself what you actually get in that trial period, and who's doing the setup work. If the answer is "me, in my spare time, with a mostly empty account," a fixed fee that buys real, hands-on setup and a real evaluation window might be the better deal even before you look at the ongoing price.

If you want to see the fee schedule and what's included, the Pilot Program section on our pricing page has the full breakdown.