Government Fleet Software Pricing: What You Can Know Before the RFP

Writing an RFP for fleet telematics means putting a budget figure in front of a council, a board or a legislative committee before any vendor has quoted you. In this category that is unusually hard, because most vendors do not publish a price. We checked all 38 fleet software vendors we cover against their own pricing pages: 13 publish a rate, 17 publish none and the absence was verified, 3 served a pricing page that could not be retrieved, 4 appear only in third-party estimates and 1 was never confirmed.

Narrow that to the 15 products we list as suitable for public fleets and the position is worse: 2 of the 15 publish a rate on their own website.

But public buyers have one source of price information that commercial buyers do not, and it covers at least one vendor that publishes nothing commercially. This page sets out what is actually knowable before you issue the RFP, with the figure, the source and the date for each.

What is published, and what is verifiably not

Three of the largest names in public fleet telematics publish no rate at all, and in each case we checked the vendor's own page and recorded what it did instead. These are verified absences, not gaps in our research.

Note the asymmetry in that table. Azuga's $25, $30 and $35 per vehicle per month are on a public page that requires nothing of you. Verizon Connect's $15.95 is lower than any of them — and it is only readable because of how the vendor sells to government, not because of anything on its website.

The lever a public buyer has: the schedule rate card

Verizon Connect publishes no consumer price. There is no pricing page on its site at all. But it is a GSA Schedule contractor, and awarded pricing under a GSA Multiple Award Schedule contract is published on GSA Advantage — which makes it one of very few vendors in this category with a real, itemised, per-SKU price list in the public domain.

The rate we read is base vehicle tracking at $15.95 per vehicle per month, with ELD, dashcams, navigation and safety features each priced as their own line item rather than bundled. The source is the terms-and-conditions document for contract 47QTCA22D00DD on GSA Advantage, current through Modification 19 dated 28 February 2025, and we verified it on 13 September 2026.

Two caveats belong next to that figure, and they are the vendor's own framing rather than ours. It is a government rate, not a commercial one, and a commercial quote may be priced differently. And a modification-dated rate card is a snapshot: modifications change pricing, so the modification number matters as much as the dollar figure when you cite it.

What this gives an RFP author is a defensible floor rather than a quote. A figure read off a published federal rate card, with a contract number and a modification date attached, is the kind of number that survives a procurement challenge. A figure from a software review site's "average cost" page is not.

What to do with the other thirteen

For the vendors that publish nothing, the useful move is to stop trying to find a price and start structuring the RFP so that the responses are comparable when they arrive. Three things cause non-comparable bids in this category, and all three are fixable in the document.

The first is the billing unit. Fleet software is sold per vehicle, per asset, per driver, per user, per completed task, per order and per shop, and sometimes two at once. Across the vendors we have checked, OptimoRoute bills per driver, Routific per order, Onfleet per completed task, RTA Fleet360 per asset with a stated 100-asset minimum, and most telematics-led platforms per vehicle. If your RFP asks for "price per unit" without defining the unit, you will receive bids in five different currencies. Specify the unit, and specify that bidders state any minimum.

The second is module structure. The Verizon Connect rate card is the clearest illustration: base tracking is one line item and ELD, cameras, navigation and safety features are others. A bid that quotes a bundled per-vehicle figure and a bid that quotes à la carte lines are not comparable until both are expressed the same way. Ask for a per-module breakdown and a fully loaded total for your actual configuration.

The third is hardware ownership, and it is the one that costs money at the end rather than the beginning. In this category devices are variously bought outright, leased, or loaned and returnable with a non-return fee. Ask three questions explicitly: who owns the device, what happens to it at the end of the term, and what the charge is if it is not returned. Vendors answer these clearly when asked in writing and rarely volunteer them.

A fourth, if your procurement rules allow it: ask for the renewal rate, not only the initial-term rate. Contract terms in this category frequently auto-renew on notice periods between 30 and 45 days, and a first-year price with an unbounded renewal is not a price.

The RFP questions that actually change a bid

• What is the billing unit, and what minimum quantity applies?
• Give the price per module and a fully loaded total for the exact configuration in our specification.
• Who owns the hardware during and after the term, and what is the non-return charge?
• What is the initial term, does it auto-renew, and how much notice must be given in what form?
• What is the renewal rate, or the cap on any increase at renewal?
• Is this product available on a federal schedule or a cooperative purchasing contract, and if so give the contract number and the current modification?
• What are the implementation, data-migration and training charges, as separate lines from the subscription?
• What happens to our data if the contract ends — in what format is it returned, and at what cost?

The sixth question is the one most likely to shorten your timeline. If a vendor already holds a schedule or cooperative contract, there may be a published price and an established vehicle to buy through, and the answer tells you whether this is a competitive procurement or a much shorter exercise.

Reporting obligations shape the specification too

Public fleets are usually accountable for things commercial fleets are not: utilisation and right-sizing, fuel and emissions reporting, cost per mile by department, and defensible maintenance records. Those are reporting requirements, and they belong in the specification as named outputs rather than as a request for better reporting.

The maintenance half of that has a federal floor for any vehicle meeting the commercial motor vehicle definition. 49 CFR 396.3(b) requires, for each vehicle controlled for 30 consecutive days or more, a means to indicate the nature and due date of inspection and maintenance operations, plus a record of inspection, repairs and maintenance with dates — retained for a year and for six months after the vehicle leaves your control, where the vehicle is housed or maintained. The annual inspection report runs on its own 14-month clock under 396.21(b)(1). Our guides to DOT annual inspection requirements and FMCSA record retention cover both in full, with the sections quoted.

Specify those as outputs the system must produce on demand at the yard, not just store centrally. Two of those retention rules name a location as well as a period, and a system that can only produce a record from head office during business hours does not satisfy them.

Where to start

In order, and the first step is the one most RFPs skip.

Check whether each vendor on your longlist holds a federal schedule or cooperative purchasing contract, and if it does, read the published rate card rather than asking for a quote. That is how the one usable figure in this category — $15.95 per vehicle per month for base tracking, contract 47QTCA22D00DD, verified 13 September 2026 — became readable at all.

Then take the vendors that publish commercially. Azuga's $25, $30 and $35 per vehicle per month are public, and whatever you think of the product, they give you a market reference point for a per-vehicle bundle that you can put next to any bid.

Then define the unit, the modules and the hardware terms in the document, and accept that the remaining thirteen will arrive as quotes. The products themselves are compared on our government fleet software page, and the full publication status of all 38 vendors, each with its source and check date, is in our pricing transparency index.