The ultimate 2024 Avalara pricing review

Whether you’re interested in Avalara pricing because you’re in the market for sales tax compliance software or you’re a current Avalara customer who feels they’re being overcharged, we’ll give you a comprehensive look at how much Avalara costs.

We’ll go over Avalara’s features and capabilities before delving into its pricing strategy all the hidden costs you should be aware of. Then, we’ll recommend some more cost-effective Avalara alternatives.

What is Avalara?

Avalara is a large publicly traded company that specializes in providing cloud-based tax compliance solutions. Focused on global sales and use tax compliance software, Avalara primarily helps ecommerce businesses in calculating tax rates, preparing returns, and overseeing their sales tax compliance.

While the company still markets many of its products towards small and medium sized businesses, since going public in 2018, Avalara has concentrated mainly on catering to large global enterprise clients.

What features are included with Avalara?

Let’s explore the features that Avalara offers before we dive into Avalara’s pricing structure.

The key thing to remember with Avalara is that they sell many of their features separately. So, you will only get the features you choose – and want to pay for.

How much does Avalara cost?

Answering the question of how much Avalara costs isn’t straightforward since Avalara doesn’t list their pricing online. To get a pricing quote, a company has to book a sales meeting with Avalara. Avalara then sells their services a la carte and provides custom volume-based pricing based on which services you choose.

This pricing approach is different from most of Avalara’s competitors who have transparent pricing on their website, allowing their customers to compare their offerings with other sales tax compliance software options.

While buying features or services like sales tax calculation, sales tax registration, and sales tax filing and remittance separately might seem like it would lead to cost savings over having to buy a full-suite of features from an Avalara alternative, many customers report that Avalara is up to 30% or more expensive than other comparable options.

Another important thing to note about Avalara’s pricing structure is that they typically offer discounts to customers who lock into longer contracts. This incentivizes customers to sign up for longer contracts – and limits their ability to change to get better services or cheaper prices from an Avalara alternative.

What is Avalara’s Volume-Based Pricing?

Avalara charges customers different prices per transaction or service depending on their sales volume. That means that a larger business with a higher sales volume will pay less per transaction than a smaller business with a lower sales volume.

Unlike some other sales tax compliance software options, there isn’t a subscription price with a set number of free transactions included in that price. That means that as your business grows you’ll pay more in total for your sales tax calculation services every month but you’ll pay less per transaction once you hit a higher transaction volume.

Avalara Pricing: Flat Fees

While Avalara doesn’t list most of their pricing online since they price their services by volume, the company does have three services for which it charges flat fees to all their customers.

Here’s the Avalara pricing for sales tax registration, business license registration, and single state filing:

Avalara Pricing: Activation Fees

Unlike many sales tax software providers which have no initiation or activation fees, Avalara is known for charging one. However, the amount Avalara charges in an activation fee varies depending on the customer.

Avalara Pricing: BigCommerce

Avalara seems to be moving towards making their customers buy their full suite of offerings as a package. In 2024, the company announced to their BigCommerce app customers that they were discontinuing their small business API-only pricing tier for sales tax calculations in their BigCommerce App.

That meant that all Avalara’s BigCommerce integration customers had to use both Avalara’s calculation and filing services – rather than just their calculations feature. By making paying for filing mandatory even if their customers were too small to have to file in many states, that upped the cost of Avalara’s BigCommerce app to start at $5,000.

Many customers had to quickly switch to another software provider. It’s unknown if Avalara will be changing their pricing structure on their primary offerings going forward but this shift in the focus of their BigCommerce app does suggest that Avalara is refocusing their business to better serve larger customers.

Avalara Pricing: Payment Fees and Reactivation Fees

In addition to Avalara’s normal pricing, they also have late fees. Avalara’s late payment fee is 1.5% per month on overdue bills (or the maximum rate allowed by law, whichever is less).

If customers fail to make payments promptly, that might also result in Avalara revising their payment terms to shorter periods. In the event of account suspensions, Avalara levies a reactivation fee equivalent to 50% of Avalara’s current service activation fee or a minimum of $250, whichever amount is higher.

Pricing Comparison: Avalara vs. TaxCloud

Think Avalara pricing is too confusing or pricey? TaxCloud is the perfect Avalara alternative for small to medium sized businesses that need sales tax calculation support in the U.S. Not only does TaxCloud have industry-leading value and pricing, we’ve also got the most helpful customer support team in the business.

TaxCloud has two pricing tiers plus a custom tier for higher order volumes or businesses with hands-on requirements. We’ll break down what’s included in TaxCloud Starter and TaxCloud Premium below before we take a look at our pricing.

One thing you’ll want to note: We offer more features than Avalara and a deal on your sales tax filing if you choose our nationwide tax filing plan. That’s because we want to make it easier for our customers to grow.

For a more detailed comparison, read TaxCloud vs Avalara: 2024 Comparison.

How much does TaxCloud cost?

Unlike Avalara, TaxCloud charges a transparent subscription fee that we list on our website so you can compare our offerings with our competitors. We do this because we’re confident you’ll see we have the best value in the industry.

We also include a number of free orders in with our pricing tiers!

TaxCloud Pricing: Filing Costs

Both TaxCloud and Avalara charge individually for state sales tax filings. However, TaxCloud’s prices are much cheaper – with $12 to $24 in savings on each filing. TaxCloud also offers a flat fee for nationwide filing.

If your company files sales tax in 30 states, that would cost:

• Avalara AvaTax: $1,200 – $1,620/month
• TaxCloud Starter: $900/month
• TaxCloud Premium: $349/month

With TaxCloud, you’d save up to $720 per month on the Starter plan and up to $1,271 per month on the Premium plan. That works out to savings of between $8,640 and $15,252 every year.

TaxCloud Beats Avalara on Pricing… by a Lot

TaxCloud is obviously the more cost-effective option compared to Avalara – and it comes with a wider array of features and support options. Choosing TaxCloud over Avalara equals more savings and better service.

Discover how TaxCloud can help you automate your sales tax compliance by doing everything from tracking your nexus status across different states to providing audit defense services.