Podium vs Birdeye vs Weave: what each one actually costs

Of the three biggest local business messaging platforms, only Podium publishes real plan prices: Core at $399 a month and Pro at $599, with Signature quoted custom. Weave publishes a floor and nothing else, "starting from $199 per month". Birdeye publishes no number at all; its pricing page is a form that asks how many locations you have and for your mobile number. So the honest three-way comparison is not $399 vs $199 vs X. It is one vendor you can price yourself, one you can partly price, and one you cannot price without a sales call.

Last updated August 2026. Every figure below was read first-hand from each vendor's own pricing page on 23 August 2026. Prices in this category move, so re-check before you sign anything.

How much does Podium cost per month?

Podium lists Core at $399 per month and Pro at $599 per month, with a third tier called Signature quoted custom. All three route to "Talk to Sales" rather than a checkout, and no annual price or free trial appears on the page. Those figures are the plan only, and the plan is not the bill.

Podium's pricing page is unusually detailed, which is a genuine credit to the company, and reading it line by line turns up eight separate billable items. Beyond the plan there is $5 a month for every phone number past the five included on Core or fifteen on Pro, a base 10DLC fee of $5 a month charged for every US location, $15 a month for high-volume carrier-verified messaging on Core (included on Pro), bulk message credits capped at 250 a month on Core and 500 on Pro that expire monthly and do not roll over, Podium Phones seats at $30 per user per month for one to four users or $25 at five or more, a $500 network optimization fee per location, and a row of AI features marked "Add-on Available" with no published price.

The single most important thing to know before you take the demo: AI Concierge, the feature that actually holds a conversation with a customer, is not on the $399 plan. Core's AI is Suggested Replies and Review Responses, which help your staff answer faster but still need your staff. Concierge starts on Pro at $599. AI Scheduler, AI Salesperson and AI Marketer require Signature, which has no published number. We pulled the whole stack apart in our Podium alternatives and Podium pricing breakdown.

How much does Birdeye cost?

Birdeye does not say. Its pricing page carries no dollar figure anywhere. What it carries instead is a lead form, and the shape of that form is the useful information: the first thing it asks is how many locations you run, offering the bands 1 to 3, 4 to 9, 10 to 39, 40 to 249, 250 to 999 and 1000+. It then asks for your best mobile number.

Read that as a pricing signal rather than a dead end. A vendor that segments its intake by location count before it will quote you is pricing per location, and the six bands tell you Birdeye is built to sell to multi-location groups and enterprises as readily as to a single shop. If you are a one-location business, you are at the bottom of a range designed to reach a thousand rooftops, and you should ask directly what a single-location contract costs and whether the quote assumes an annual term.

How much does Weave cost?

Weave states that its plans start "from $199 per month" and stops there. There is no per-tier table, no feature matrix against a price, and the top tier, Ultimate, has a "Get Enterprise Pricing" call to action rather than a number. Reading the feature grid underneath the cards on 3 September 2026, twenty four of its thirty rows are identical on all three plans, and we decoded the six that are not in our breakdown of Weave pricing. Weave's own emphasis is healthcare-adjacent local practices, dental and optometry above all, and its phone system is genuinely central to the product rather than an add-on.

That $199 floor is the most useful published number in the healthcare local-business category, where almost nobody publishes anything. NexHealth, Solutionreach, Luma Health and RevenueWell all publish nothing, and two of those pricing URLs return a 404. Weave saying $199 out loud is worth something even though it stops short of a full table.

Which of the three publishes a price?

None of the three lets you buy without talking to someone, which is normal for this category and worth planning around. Book all three demos in the same week, hold the same volume assumptions across them, and get every quote in writing including the fees that sit outside the plan line.

Podium vs Birdeye vs Weave: which is best for my business?

Which Weave tier you land on matters as much as which vendor, and we worked that through in Weave Elite vs Ultimate vs Pro pricing.

They overlap heavily and still have distinct centers of gravity. Podium is the strongest of the three at texting as a sales motion, which is why it is so heavily used in automotive and home services, and its phone system and text-to-pay are mature. Birdeye is the most reputation-first of the three and the most comfortable at large location counts, with review monitoring across a wide set of sites. Weave is the most healthcare-native, and in dental and optometry its integration with practice management software is the reason people pick it.

Do I need all three products in one platform?

Often not, and this is where the money leaks. All three of these vendors sell a bundle: reviews plus texting plus payments plus, in two cases, a phone system. Bundles are genuinely convenient when you use all of it. They are expensive when you bought the bundle for one feature.

Run this check before the demo. List which of the four jobs you actually need today: generating and answering reviews, two-way texting with customers, taking payments by text, and replacing your phone system. If the honest answer is one or two of them, price those separately before you price the bundle. A shop that only wants review requests and a shared text inbox is frequently paying a phone-system-sized bill for a phone system it never turned on.

What should I ask on the demo call?

Five questions, and ask them in this order because each one changes the next answer.

• What is the total monthly bill for my exact setup, including every fee outside the plan line? Name your location count and your seat count out loud. Per-location fees are the single biggest reason a quoted price and a first invoice differ.
• Which tier does the autonomous AI sit on? With Podium the answer is Pro or Signature, not Core. Ask the same question of the other two, because "AI included" often means AI drafting rather than AI answering.
• Is there a contract term, and is the price annual or monthly? None of the three publish contract terms, so this only surfaces in the call.
• What happens to unused message or campaign credits? Podium states its bulk message credits expire at the end of each month and do not roll over. Assume the same everywhere unless told otherwise in writing.
• What is the onboarding or setup fee? Podium's $500 per-location network optimization fee only appears as a footnote. Ask for the equivalent footnote at the other two.

Is there a cheaper alternative to Podium, Birdeye and Weave?

Yes, if you are willing to unbundle. The expensive part of all three is that you are buying reviews, payments, phones and messaging together whether or not you use them. If the job you actually care about is conversations, an AI messaging agent covers it for a fraction of a full local-business suite, and you keep your existing phone system and payment processor.

That is the shape MessageAgent takes. One AI persona answers, qualifies, books and upsells across SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook DM, web chat and email, in one inbox with a lightweight CRM, on one flat subscription with carrier and Meta message fees passed through at cost. There is no per-resolution meter, no per-location fee and no phone seat. It also does not do reviews or payments, and if those are the reason you are shopping, one of the three above is the right answer and we are not pretending otherwise. Being straight about our own status: MessageAgent is pre-launch, so the published plans are what we intend to launch with and there is a waitlist rather than a checkout today.

If you are evaluating for a dealership specifically, the vendor set is different again and mostly publishes nothing: see our breakdown of the car dealership chatbot options. If the job is narrower still, a missed call text back tool or an automated appointment reminder tool solves one problem each at a much smaller number. And for how this whole category meters AI on top of the platform fee, we counted the meters vendor by vendor in AI customer service agent pricing.

Two more names belong in this shortlist if transparency is what you are optimizing for, because both of them publish a self-serve price and a free trial where these three do not. Thryv prints $99 a month for Starter and $399 for Signature, which we broke down line by line in Thryv pricing, and GoHighLevel prints $97, $297 and $497 alongside fourteen add-on rates. They are priced as opposites, one capping seats and bundling AI, the other uncapping seats and metering per client account, and we worked the break-even in Thryv vs GoHighLevel pricing.

The bottom line

Update, September 2, 2026: Podium has removed its published prices. When we first wrote this, Podium was the only one of the three you could price yourself, at $399 for Core and $599 for Pro, and it was also the one whose published page carried the most fees underneath the plan. Reading podium.com/pricing again on September 2, 2026, those figures are gone, no tier names remain, and the page routes to an industry-selection form that publishes nothing. Weave still gives you a $199 floor and a sales call. Birdeye still gives you a location-count form. So all three of these now quote privately, and the two biggest names in the category did it within ten days of each other.

That changes the practical advice. You can no longer do the arithmetic on any of the three before the call, so go into all three conversations with your location count, seat count and message volume already written down, and insist each vendor quotes the same list of modules. We compared the two head-on, including exactly what each quote form collects before it will talk money, in Birdeye vs Podium pricing, and pulled apart what Birdeye's six location bands imply for your quote in Birdeye pricing.