The short answer
Enterprise search software is priced three ways: per seat, bundled into a suite you already pay for, or metered on infrastructure. Per-seat tools for internal AI search typically land in the tens of dollars per user per month, and the category leaders sell through sales-quoted annual contracts with seat minimums rather than published prices. Microsoft 365 Copilot publishes $30 per user per month on an annual commitment, as an add-on to a qualifying base plan. Atlassian Rovo is included at no incremental cost in eligible paid Atlassian Cloud plans. Cloud search services like Amazon Kendra bill provisioned index capacity whether or not anyone searches.
Last updated: July 2026. Vendor prices change; verify before you buy.
Pricing is the first question every buyer asks and the last thing most vendors will tell you. Search the category and you will find plenty of pages that promise a price and deliver a "book a demo" button. This article is an attempt to be genuinely useful instead: what the pricing models actually are, what the numbers look like where they are public, and which line items ambush people at contract time.
One caveat up front, and it is the honest one. Several major vendors in this category do not publish prices at all. Where that is true, I say so rather than inventing a number, and where I quote reported figures they are labeled as reported. Anything else would be guessing at your expense.
The three pricing models
Almost every product in this space bills in one of three shapes, and knowing which one you are looking at tells you more than any single number.
Per seat
You pay a monthly or annual fee per user with access. This is how most dedicated AI enterprise search products are sold. It is predictable, it scales with headcount, and it means an employee who searches twice a month costs the same as one who lives in the tool. Watch for two things: the seat minimum, and whether AI or agent usage is included in the seat or metered on top.
Bundled into a suite
The search is included with a platform you already license. Atlassian Rovo is the clearest example: Rovo Search, Chat and Agents come at no incremental cost inside eligible paid Atlassian Cloud plans. Microsoft's version is an add-on rather than a freebie, but the logic is the same, you are buying deeper into a suite. Bundled search is often the best value on paper, and the catch is always the same: it is best inside its own ecosystem, and the further your knowledge lives from that ecosystem, the less complete the answers get.
Consumption or infrastructure
You pay for capacity and usage rather than people. Amazon Kendra is the canonical example: you provision an index and pay for storage units and query unit hours from the moment the index is created until you delete it, plus connector sync time. The appeal is that it scales with what you actually run. The trap is that provisioned capacity bills whether or not a single employee searches, and the engineering to build a usable application on top is a cost that never shows up on the invoice.
What the market actually charges
| Product | Model | Published price? | What to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glean | Per seat, annual | No. Sales-quoted | Seat minimums commonly reported in the 50 to 100 range; advanced AI and agent usage reported as billed on top |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | Per seat add-on | Yes. $30 per user per month, annual | Requires a qualifying M365 base plan, so the true cost is base plus $30 |
| Atlassian Rovo | Bundled | Yes. No incremental cost in eligible paid Cloud plans | Chat and Agent requests draw on monthly credit allowances that vary by plan tier and seats |
| Amazon Kendra | Provisioned capacity | Yes, but as units not outcomes | In maintenance mode and closed to new customers from July 30, 2026; index bills continuously |
| Coveo | Platform, per query and per seat | No. Sales-quoted | Implementation and relevance tuning is a significant project cost on top of license |
| InSearch | Per seat | Yes. See pricing | No hard seat minimum; cited answers are the product, not a metered add-on |
The pattern in that table is the thing worth taking away. The products aimed at large enterprises hide their price, and the ones that publish either bundle it into something bigger or charge you for infrastructure. If you want to compare cost before entering a sales cycle, your options narrow fast, which is precisely why published pricing is worth something on its own.
How much does Glean cost?
Glean does not publish pricing, so there is no official figure to quote. What buyers, procurement platforms and analysts consistently report is a sales-quoted annual per-seat contract in the tens of dollars per user per month, with the rate varying by deal size and negotiation, and a seat minimum that commonly lands somewhere between 50 and 100 users. Advanced AI and agent usage is generally reported as billed separately from the base seat.
Treat every number you read, including that one, as a negotiating range rather than a price list. We go deeper into what to pin down in writing on our Glean pricing breakdown, including the three contract terms that most often surprise buyers after signature.
The costs that are not on the price list
The license is rarely the whole bill. In this category, four things reliably show up later.
- The seat minimum. A $40 per user price with a 100-seat floor is a $48,000 a year decision, not a $40 one. If you are a 30-person team, the effective price per person you actually have is more than triple the sticker.
- Metered AI usage. Increasingly, search is included but the assistant is credited. Ask what a "request" costs, what happens when you exhaust the allowance, and whether heavy users can burn the pool for everyone.
- Implementation. Platform-style products (and anything you build on cloud search infrastructure) need connectors configured, relevance tuned and an interface built. That is engineering time, and it is usually the largest hidden number.
- Content that is not machine readable. Scanned contracts, image PDFs and screenshots are invisible to every search index until the text is pulled out of them. If a meaningful share of your corpus is scans, budget for extracting the data from those documents as part of the rollout, because no amount of retrieval quality rescues content the index cannot read.
Is enterprise search software worth the cost?
The usual justification is time recovered. The arithmetic is simple enough to do honestly with your own numbers rather than a vendor's study: take the fully loaded hourly cost of the people who would use it, multiply by the hours per week they spend hunting for information or interrupting colleagues, and compare that to the annual seat cost. For knowledge workers on six-figure salaries, even thirty minutes a week recovered clears a typical per-seat price comfortably.
The honest caveat is that this only holds if people actually use it. A search tool that returns a list of links to sift through gets abandoned, and an abandoned tool has an infinite cost per answer. The reason cited, written answers matter commercially rather than just technically is adoption: people keep using a thing that answers them and quietly stop using a thing that gives them homework.
How to run the comparison
If you are evaluating right now, a few things make the process much less painful:
- Normalize to cost per user per year, including minimums. Not the headline rate. Divide the real annual contract by the people who will genuinely log in.
- Get the seat minimum and the add-on list in writing before you get attached to a product.
- Test with your own questions. Bring twenty real questions your team actually asks, ones whose answers span two or three systems, and see which tool answers them correctly with a source you can click.
- Price the ecosystem lock-in. Bundled search is cheap until half your knowledge sits outside the bundle. Count how many of your twenty test questions the bundled option can even reach.
If it helps to see the alternatives side by side rather than just their price tags, our guide to the best enterprise search tools in 2026 compares them on capability, and enterprise search software shows what a cited, permission-aware answer across Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce actually looks like on your own content.