Course Evaluation Software Pricing in 2026: What It Costs and Why Nobody Publishes a Price

Short answer: no established course evaluation vendor publishes a price, and the ones that publish survey-tool pricing are not quoting you for course evaluation. Every serious platform in this category — evasys, Blue by Explorance, Watermark, Anthology, Qualtrics — sells through a quote. As of publication, none of them published list pricing for institution-wide course evaluation deployment.

That is frustrating when you are building a business case, but it is not a conspiracy. It reflects a real characteristic of the category: the price is driven by variables that differ enormously between institutions, and the vendor genuinely cannot quote you without knowing them. The useful response is not to hunt for a price list that does not exist. It is to understand the cost drivers well enough to predict your own number, and to structure a procurement that forces bids into a comparable shape.

This guide covers what actually drives the number, what publicly available third-party data suggests, the costs that never appear on the quote, and a pricing structure to specify in your RFP.

What the pricing models actually look like

The vendors in this market do not price the same way, which is the first reason raw quotes are hard to compare.

Vendor	Public list pricing	Typical model	Notes
evasys	Not published	Quote-based, commonly scaled to institution size	Long-established in UK and German higher education; frequently procured through competitive tender or purchasing frameworks
Blue (Explorance)	Not published	Quote-based, enterprise licence	Positioned as an institution-wide feedback analytics platform; scope typically extends beyond course evaluation
Watermark	Not published	Quote-based, often bundled	Course evaluation sits within a wider assessment and accreditation suite
Anthology	Not published	Quote-based, often bundled with wider stack	Commonly bought alongside other Anthology products
Qualtrics	Not published for enterprise	Quote-based, licence plus response volume	General-purpose XM platform; course evaluation is a configuration, not a product
SurveyMonkey	Published for individual and team plans	Seat-based; enterprise is quote-only	Published plans are not designed for institution-wide evaluation
Typeform	Published for standard plans	Seat and response based	Same caveat — a form builder, not an evaluation system
Koji for Education	Quote-based	Scaled to students evaluated and evaluation cycles	Quote reflects deployment scope; see the cost-driver section below

The pattern is clear. Where pricing is published, it is for general-purpose survey tooling on self-service plans that no institution would actually deploy for institution-wide module evaluation. Where the product is genuinely built for course evaluation, pricing is quote-only.

What third-party contract data shows

Some independent aggregators publish buyer-reported contract data. These figures deserve caveats before the numbers: they are self-reported and aggregated by procurement intermediaries, they skew heavily toward US and commercial buyers rather than European higher education, and they cover the vendor's whole customer base rather than course evaluation specifically. Treat them as an order-of-magnitude sanity check, not a benchmark.

With that said, procurement intermediary Vendr's marketplace data for Qualtrics reports a median annual contract around $28,500, with a reported range spanning roughly $6,500 to over $126,000. That spread — a factor of nearly twenty — is the most informative part of the data. It tells you that the vendor name explains very little about the price. The configuration explains almost all of it.

For evasys, Blue, Watermark, and Anthology, we found no publicly available contract-value data specific to European higher education course evaluation. Any figure you see quoted for these products without a named source should be treated as invented.

The seven variables that actually set your price

If you want to predict your quote before you receive it, these are the levers. Almost every quote in this category is some function of them.

1. Students, not staff. Most pricing scales with the population being evaluated — enrolled students, or student-module enrolments per cycle. A 30,000-student institution will not pay twice what a 15,000-student institution pays, but it will pay meaningfully more. Ask vendors to state the unit explicitly, because "students" and "student-module enrolments" can differ by a factor of five or more at the same institution.

2. Evaluation cycles per year. Two semesters, three trimesters, continuous modular delivery, plus mid-module formative rounds. More cycles means more processing and usually more money.

3. Scope beyond course evaluation. This is the biggest single driver of quote variance and the most common source of non-comparable bids. Some vendors quote course evaluation; others quote a platform that also covers staff surveys, student experience surveys, graduate outcomes, and 360 feedback. The second quote is larger and is not for the same thing.

4. Integration depth. A read-only student information system export is cheap. Bidirectional integration with your SIS and LMS — automated cohort provisioning, enrolment sync, single sign-on, results write-back — takes real implementation work and is usually a separate line.

5. Implementation and migration. First-year cost commonly includes configuration, instrument design, historical data migration, and training. This is frequently a one-off charge in the range of a substantial fraction of the annual licence, and it is where quotes diverge most sharply.

6. Hosting and data residency. EU or in-country hosting, or a dedicated instance, may carry a premium over shared multi-tenant hosting. For European institutions this is rarely optional, so make sure it is in the base quote rather than an upsell. Our guide to GDPR-compliant course evaluation software covers what to require here.

7. Support tier and contract length. Named account management, guaranteed response times, and multi-year commitments all move the number, usually in exchange for a discount on years two and three.

The costs that never appear on the quote

The licence fee is not the cost of the system. In this category, the internal cost is frequently larger than the vendor invoice, and it is almost always invisible in the business case.

Manual qualitative analysis. This is the dominant hidden cost and the one that most often goes unbudgeted. A traditional evaluation platform hands you a spreadsheet of open-text comments. Somebody has to read them. At an institution running 800 modules with 40 free-text comments each, that is 32,000 comments per cycle. If a QA officer processes 100 comments an hour — optimistic, if they are coding themes rather than skimming — that is 320 hours per cycle, roughly two full-time months of professional staff time twice a year. Price that at your actual salary cost and compare it to the licence fee. At most institutions it is the larger number.

In practice, the work usually does not happen. The comments get skimmed, the quantitative averages get reported, and the richest evidence in the dataset goes unused — which is the real reason so many evaluation systems produce compliance artefacts rather than insight.

Response rate remediation. Low response rates are expensive in a way nobody invoices for. Chasing them costs staff time, and worse, a 12% response rate produces evidence that will not survive an accreditation panel's scrutiny — which means the entire spend produced nothing usable.

Administrative configuration. Building and maintaining the evaluation instrument, cohort logic, release rules, and report distribution across a large institution is a recurring staff cost, not a one-off.

Report interpretation. Producing reports is not the same as anybody acting on them. If programme leaders cannot understand the output without help, the QA office becomes a permanent translation layer.

Exit cost. Ask before you sign: in what format does your historical evaluation data leave, and at what cost? Longitudinal comparability is the main asset an evaluation system accumulates, and losing it at renewal hands the incumbent enormous pricing leverage.

How to run a procurement that produces comparable bids

The single most common procurement failure in this category is receiving five quotes that cannot be compared because each vendor scoped differently. Fix that by specifying the shape of the answer, not just the requirements.

Mandate a fixed pricing schedule. Require every bidder to complete the same table: annual licence for the defined scope; one-off implementation; integration; training; support tier; and years two through five, with any uplift stated as a percentage cap. Reject prose pricing.

Define the scope precisely and identically. State your student number, your student-module enrolment count, your cycles per year, and exactly which survey types are in and out. Ambiguity here is what produces incomparable bids.

Require a five-year total cost of ownership. Annual licence alone systematically favours vendors with high implementation charges and aggressive renewal uplifts. Five-year TCO exposes both.

Cap renewal increases contractually. Ask for a stated maximum annual uplift. A vendor unwilling to cap it is telling you something about their renewal strategy.

Price the internal cost of each option. Include, as a scored line, the estimated staff hours per cycle each solution requires for qualitative analysis. This is the line that changes procurement outcomes most often, because it is where platforms differ by an order of magnitude rather than by a percentage.

Ask for a reference at your scale, in your jurisdiction. A reference customer of a comparable size under the same regulatory regime is worth more than any feature matrix.

Where Koji fits — and where it does not

Koji for Education is quote-based, like everyone else in the category. Our quote scales with the number of students evaluated and the number of evaluation cycles, and EU data residency is in the base configuration rather than a premium tier.

The honest case for the economics is not that the licence is cheaper — it is that the hidden qualitative-analysis cost largely disappears. Because evaluation runs as an AI-moderated conversation rather than a static form, the follow-up probing that a human researcher would do happens automatically and consistently, and thematic analysis across every response is produced without anyone coding comments by hand. The 320-hours-per-cycle line in the section above is the cost that changes. Koji uses the same AI interview engine as the main Koji platform used for customer and user research outside higher education.

Where a competitor is the better buy. Three cases, stated plainly:

• You have a settled, purely quantitative instrument. If your evaluation is a validated Likert instrument that does not change, your reporting needs are statistical, and open-text is genuinely peripheral, established survey-automation platforms do that job well and the AI capability is not worth paying for.
• Consolidated procurement outranks capability. If your institution is committed to a single vendor suite and the evaluation module comes at marginal cost inside an existing contract, a standalone platform has to overcome a commercial gap that feature quality alone rarely closes.
• Your budget is genuinely near zero. If there is no realistic licence budget, an open-source or free tool plus institutional staff time is a coherent choice. See our guide to open-source and free course evaluation software — just budget the staff time honestly, because that is where the cost actually lands.

The bottom line

There is no price list because there is no standard deployment. What there is, is a predictable set of drivers: student population, cycles per year, scope, integration depth, implementation, hosting, and support. Model those honestly and you can forecast your quote within a reasonable band before you talk to a single vendor.

Then add the line that most business cases omit: the staff hours your institution will spend every cycle turning raw feedback into something a programme committee or an accreditation panel can actually use. That number is real, it is recurring, and in this category it is frequently larger than the software.

Want a quote scoped to your institution? Talk to us with your student numbers and evaluation cycles, and we will give you a figure and the assumptions behind it.