Birdeye vs Podium pricing: neither one publishes a price anymore

Neither of them publishes a price anymore. We read both pricing pages first-hand on 2 September 2026: birdeye.com/pricing contains zero dollar figures outside customer testimonials, and podium.com/pricing has removed the Core and Pro plan prices it was still showing on 23 August 2026. Both now route you to a quote form. The useful difference is how they sort you before they quote: Birdeye asks how many locations you run and for your mobile number, Podium asks which industry you are in. If you are comparing the two, you are comparing two sales conversations, not two price sheets.

Last updated September 2026. Both pages were read first-hand on 2 September 2026 from a United States connection. Prices and pricing pages move, and this category has moved twice in a fortnight. Re-check before you sign anything.

Does Birdeye publish its pricing?

No. The Birdeye pricing page returns a normal page of roughly 6,000 characters of text and not one plan price. There are no tier names, no per-user rate and no starting-from figure. The only dollar amounts on the page sit inside customer quotes, where operators describe revenue they credit to the product. That is not a price.

What Birdeye prints instead is a positioning line and a two-field form. The line reads: pricing built around outcomes, not seat counts, one platform, one contract, replace point products and pay only for what you deploy at your locations. The form asks how many locations you run, offering six bands, and for the best mobile number to reach you. That is the entire pricing page. We break down what each of those bands implies in our full analysis of Birdeye pricing.

Does Podium publish its pricing?

It did ten days ago. It does not now, and that is the more interesting half of this comparison.

On 23 August 2026 we recorded Podium publishing Core at $399 a month and Pro at $599 a month, with Signature quoted custom, alongside a long list of separately billed lines. Reading the same URL on 2 September 2026, those numbers are gone. The page now says plans designed to fit your specific business needs, talk to our sales team for details. No tier names appear. No prices appear. We followed every pricing-related link on the page and found only two destinations, the pricing page itself and a form at podium.com/getpricing, which asks you to select your industry and offers Auto Dealerships, Home Services, Aesthetics and Retail. That form contains no dollar figures either.

This matters practically. Every comparison article, listicle and Reddit thread currently telling you Podium starts at $399 is quoting a page that no longer exists in that form. Our own Podium alternatives breakdown carries those August figures with the date attached, which is exactly why dating a competitor price is worth the trouble.

What each quote form actually asks

Since neither publishes a rate, the forms are the real evidence. Here is what each one collects before it will talk money.

Read the third row again, because it is the whole comparison in one line. Birdeye segments by size. Podium segments by vertical. Birdeye wants to know how many sites it is deploying across, which tells you the contract scales with locations. Podium wants to know what business you are in, which tells you it sells configured, industry-specific packages and prices them by what that vertical will bear.

How much does Birdeye cost?

There is no published answer, but the structure tells you how the number will be built. The billing unit is the location, stated explicitly in Birdeye's own copy: pay only for what you deploy at your locations, and pricing built around outcomes, not seat counts. Combine that with modular scope, since Birdeye sells Reviews AI, Listings AI, Social AI, Search AI, Marketing Automation, Insights AI, Messaging AI, Chatbot AI, Texting, Surveys and Ticketing as separable products, and you get a quote with two variables: how many locations, and how many modules.

That means two businesses with identical headcount and revenue can be quoted very differently. A thirty-person single-site practice is cheap under a per-location model. A forty-site operator with two staff each is expensive under it. Work out which of those you resemble before the call.

How much does Podium cost?

Also unpublished now, but there is a useful historical anchor. As of 23 August 2026 Podium printed $399 for Core and $599 for Pro, and separately billed across roughly eight lines: per-phone-number fees past the plan allowance, 10DLC registration per US location, high-volume carrier-verified messaging on Core, monthly bulk credits that expired if unused, Podium Phones per user, and a $500 network optimization fee per location. Whether all of those survive into the new quote-only model is exactly the thing to ask.

One genuine change is visible on the current page. Podium now says add on AI Employee to any plan, and its AI Employee, marketed as Jerry, is presented as available across the range. In August, AI Concierge started at the Pro tier and the AI Scheduler, Salesperson and Marketer agents were Signature-only. If AI is now attachable to the entry plan, the effective cost of getting an autonomous agent at Podium may have come down even as the transparency went away.

Which is cheaper, Birdeye or Podium?

Nobody outside their sales teams can answer that honestly, and you should distrust any article that does. What you can do is make the two quotes comparable, which most buyers fail to do. Write down the modules you actually need, reviews, listings, social, web chat, SMS, appointment booking, payments, and require both vendors to quote that identical list for your exact location count. Ask each for the contract term, the renewal uplift, the price of adding a location mid-term, and whether messaging volume is metered on top of the platform fee. Then compare.

Without that discipline you will receive one quote covering four modules and another covering eleven, and conclude that one vendor is expensive when it was simply quoting more product.

What the disappearing prices tell you about the category

Two of the largest local business platforms in the United States pulled or withheld their published prices, and the second of those changes happened inside a ten-day window. The pattern is worth naming: as these platforms move from selling software seats to selling bundled AI outcomes, published per-seat pricing stops fitting the story they want to tell. Birdeye says it out loud, with outcomes, not seat counts printed on the page.

The consequence for buyers is that transparency has become a differentiator rather than a baseline. Thryv still publishes $99 and $399 with a free trial button, and GoHighLevel still publishes three plans plus fourteen add-on rates. If being able to budget without a sales call matters to you, that is now a real reason to shortlist those two, and it costs the other two nothing to keep quiet because their buyers phone anyway.

It also changes how these vendors get found. Birdeye now sells a product called Search AI, described as helping brands be the answer on Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity, which is a fair signal of where local visibility work is heading. Multi-location operators increasingly need their listings, reviews and site content to be consistent enough that an assistant can quote them correctly, and that is a different discipline from ranking a single page, which is why teams doing it at scale tend to use software that audits and rewrites the pages rather than just grading them.

Which should a multi-location business choose?

Birdeye has the stronger claim. Three of its six sizing bands sit above forty locations, it leads with being number one on G2 in the Enterprise segment, and its whole model is built around deploying consistently across sites. If you run fifty dental practices or two hundred storage facilities and need reviews, listings and social managed uniformly with per-location reporting, that is the product designed for the job.

Podium's strength at scale is narrower but real: it is unusually good at the phone-and-text side of a local business, and its industry-specific packaging for auto dealerships and home services reflects genuine depth in those verticals rather than marketing gloss. A fifteen-rooftop dealer group should absolutely take both calls.

Which should a single location choose?

Honestly, probably neither first. Both are enterprise-shaped sales motions with no trial and no self-serve path, which is a lot of friction for one site. Thryv publishes a price you can read and a trial you can start. If your actual problem is narrower still, missed calls, slow replies, unbooked appointments, then you are looking for a conversation layer rather than a marketing suite. We compared the three closest names in this space in Podium vs Birdeye vs Weave, and the specific missed-call problem is covered in missed call text back software.

That is the gap MessageAgent is built for: an AI agent that answers, qualifies, books and follows up across SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and web chat, at a planned flat $79, $199 or $499 a month with no location multiplier and carrier and Meta fees passed through at cost. It sits alongside a reputation platform rather than replacing one, it covers business texting in the same subscription, and how the rest of this category meters you is documented in our census of AI customer service pricing models. The product is pre-launch and not yet purchasable; you can join the waitlist today.

The one question that decides it

Ask yourself what you are actually being charged for. Birdeye charges for locations. Podium, historically, charged for a plan plus a long tail of telecom and per-location fees. Thryv charges for a plan. GoHighLevel charges per sub-account. Zendesk charges per resolved conversation. Those are five different units, and the unit matters far more than the headline rate, because the unit is what multiplies as you grow. Get both vendors to tell you their unit in writing, then model it at the size you expect to be in two years rather than the size you are today.