Ask the internet what billing software costs in India and you get three answers for the same product. Marg's Gold edition reads ₹26,000 on one directory and ₹25,200 on another. Vyapar's desktop Silver year is ₹3,399, ₹3,420.82, ₹3,799 or ₹4,599 depending on which page you land on. GoFrugal's own pricing page, the week we checked, showed no numbers at all.
None of these pages is necessarily lying. They are counting different things. We sell billing software ourselves — read what follows knowing that — but we spent a day pinning down what these three vendors and the directories around them actually publish, so that the next quote you receive, from anyone, is one you can decode.
Why the same software has four prices
Almost every contradiction we found comes down to one of five habits of the trade:
- Licence versus subscription. The older desktop model is a one-time licence plus a yearly AMC (annual maintenance contract) for support and updates. The newer model is a flat yearly subscription. A directory with a single "price" field flattens both into one number and rarely tells you which model it captured.
- GST in or out. Software carries 18% GST (the CBIC rate schedule for IT and software services, unchanged as of August 2026). A ₹10,000 quote is ₹11,800 on the invoice. Some pages state tax-inclusive figures, some tax-exclusive, and many do not say which.
- Per what? Per user, per device, per store, per company — the same edition can double in cost when the second counter or the second branch arrives.
- Edition ladders and add-ons. The advertised figure is usually the bottom rung. The feature you actually came for may live two editions up, or in a paid add-on.
- MRP versus offer versus reseller. Vendors publish an MRP, run an offer price under it, and resellers quote their own margin on top or under both. Each of those numbers ends up on somebody's page.
Add one more: dates. Directories copy a vendor's page whenever they last visited, and almost never say when that was. Two directories disagreeing may simply be two photographs of different days.
Marg ERP 9+: same ladder, different arithmetic
Techjockey's Marg ERP 9+ listing, accessed 6 August 2026, shows Nano at ₹5,550, Basic at ₹10,300, Silver at ₹13,900 and Gold at ₹26,000 — described as per-year figures, "exclusive of all taxes". SoftwareSuggest's listing, accessed the same day, shows a different ladder: Basic ₹8,100, Silver ₹12,600, Gold ₹25,200, each labelled "Full Licence" — with no word on whether that is one-time or recurring. A third tracker, ITforSME, accessed 6 August 2026, titles its Marg page "one-time cost plus yearly AMC" — a third model entirely, in which the big number is paid once and a smaller support charge repeats each year.
Marg does publish a price list — on margcompusoft.com, the company's older corporate domain (Marg ERP Ltd was formerly Marg Compusoft), rather than on the main margerp.com site. That page, accessed 6 August 2026, shows the same ₹10,300 / ₹13,900 / ₹26,000 ladder plus 18% GST, with extra users and extra companies at ₹3,000 each and Gold as the unlimited-user tier. So the same Gold edition reads as ₹26,000 a year on one page, ₹25,200 once on another, and ₹26,000 plus GST plus per-user charges on a third — and just one of the three says whether tax is in.
If you buy Marg, still get a partner's written quote — ask it with the questions further down.
Vyapar: the vendor's numbers live in scripts
Vyapar does publish prices — but when we fetched vyaparapp.in/pricing on 6 August 2026, the page's HTML carried no figures at all; they are drawn in by scripts after the page loads. Everyone who copies that page is copying whatever it showed on the day they visited, and the copies disagree.
Techjockey, accessed 6 August 2026, lists the one-year desktop Silver plan at ₹3,799 and Gold at ₹4,099, with desktop-plus-mobile at ₹4,399 and ₹4,799. A Vyapar reseller, 108 Tech Solutionz, accessed the same day, shows the same desktop Silver year as "MRP ₹4,599", offer price ₹3,399 plus taxes extra. ITQlick — which, unusually among these listings, dates its own figure — says Vyapar starts at ₹3,399 a year as of 18 February 2026. And SoftwareSuggest, also accessed 6 August 2026, lists the desktop Silver year at ₹3,420.82 — a figure with paise in it. ₹3,420.82 is exactly ₹2,899 plus 18% GST; the paise give the arithmetic away. Somewhere along the chain a tax-exclusive price was converted to tax-inclusive, and neither page says which convention it is using.
So one plan, four published prices, a spread of roughly a third — MRP versus offer, tax in versus tax out, and photographs taken on different days. None of the pages is wrong, exactly. They are just not measuring the same thing.
GoFrugal: a pricing page under maintenance
GoFrugal's own plans-and-pricing page, fetched on 6 August 2026, carried a notice that the page is under maintenance, with placeholders where the figures would be. The structure is still visible: on-premise retail plans are a one-time licence plus a yearly subscription, cloud plans are per store, annual billing is framed as "pay for 10 months, use for a year", prices are stated as inclusive of GST for India, and the Enterprise tier is priced by quote.
The directories carry numbers the vendor currently does not. Techjockey, accessed the same day, lists GoFrugal Retail POS at ₹8,999 a year for Starter, ₹14,999 for Standard and ₹24,999 for Professional. Meanwhile reseller listings on IndiaMART, also accessed 6 August 2026, offer GoFrugal software as a boxed, one-time purchase. A subscription on one page, a one-time product on another, and no number at all at the source: if you shortlist GoFrugal, the quote you get in writing is the figure that counts.
How to decode any quote — theirs or ours
Whatever software you are pricing, the same six questions turn any quote into a real yearly cost:
- Is this figure one-time or per year? If one-time, what is the AMC, and what will renewal cost in year two?
- Is 18% GST included? Ask for the number as it will appear on the invoice.
- Per what — user, device, store, company? What does the second counter cost?
- Which edition is this, and is the feature you came for (barcodes, batch and expiry, e-invoicing, a second branch) in this edition or a higher one?
- Is this the MRP or an offer price — and which one will renewal be charged at?
- Can you have it in writing, with a date? Every number in this post is a dated snapshot; a verbal quote is not even that.
Our own numbers, for contrast
A post about pricing that hides its own would be a poor joke. Layerdots ERP has three plans, published on the pricing page with GST stated beside each figure: Basic is ₹3,500 + 18% GST = ₹4,130 a year, Gold is ₹7,000 + GST = ₹8,260 a year, Platinum is ₹11,000 + GST = ₹12,980 a year. The tiers differ by how many AI invoice scans you get each month, how many shops one licence runs, how many people you can share a shop with, and whether one-click e-way bills through the API are included (Gold and Platinum; every plan can record a manually generated EWB number on the bill) — not by which of your own reports you are allowed to see. One licence covers Windows and Mac, and before any money moves there is a 7-day free trial — no card, no online account.
We are not going to call ourselves cheaper. After the tables above you can see how flexible that word is — it depends on which snapshot you believe and whose tax convention you adopt. These are simply our numbers, with the tax shown, and you can do the arithmetic against any quote you hold. And if you are past asking the price and already planning the move, we wrote separately about switching a retail shop off Tally or Marg — what carries over and what to check before you commit.
Common questions
So what does Marg ERP cost per year?
It depends on which source you believe and which model applies. In August 2026 we saw the Gold
edition listed at ₹26,000 per year exclusive of tax (Techjockey), ₹25,200 as a "Full Licence"
(SoftwareSuggest), and ₹26,000 plus GST plus ₹3,000 per extra user on margcompusoft.com,
Marg's own price-list page. Ask a partner for a written quote that answers the six questions
above.
Is Vyapar ₹3,399 or ₹3,799 a year?
Both figures were live on 6 August 2026 — ₹3,399 plus taxes as a reseller's offer price against
an MRP of ₹4,599, and ₹3,799 on Techjockey. The gap is MRP-versus-offer plus tax-in-versus-tax-out,
not a typo. Vyapar's own page draws its numbers in with scripts, so check it directly on the day
you buy.
What does Layerdots ERP cost?
Basic ₹4,130, Gold ₹8,260, Platinum ₹12,980 per year — those figures include 18% GST, and the
pre-tax amounts (₹3,500, ₹7,000, ₹11,000) are stated alongside on the
pricing page. The 7-day trial comes before any payment,
with no card and no online account.