AI contract review is meant to deliver efficiency. So why does it so often come with a jaw-dropping price tag? The promise is speed, consistency, and reduced legal spend. But most pricing in the market tells a different story – one that’s less about product value and more about the hidden economics behind legal tech. This guide breaks down what you’re really paying for, what fair pricing should look like, and why most tools miss the mark.

What AI Contract Review Actually Costs to Deliver

Let’s break this down. A serious AI contract review tool has five cost centers—only two of which relate directly to the product.

  1. Model Access
    Most vendors don’t train their own models. They pay to access OpenAI, Anthropic, or another frontier model via API. These costs are usage-based and charged per token, meaning the more text you process—or the more model calls you stack in a single review—the more expensive the review becomes.
  2. Infrastructure
    Running secure, enterprise-ready AI is not free. You’re paying for Azure or AWS hosting, encryption, SOC 2 compliance, audit logging, and identity management. These are table stakes for legal departments, but they add significant marginal cost per user—especially for vendors targeting Fortune 500 clients.
  3. Support & Implementation
    Most tools need to be “trained” on your rules—either through playbook uploads or human-led configuration. That means onboarding teams, solution engineers, CSMs, and support layers. For enterprise buyers, you’re often covering not just your own onboarding, but a team that was built to hand-hold 100 other clients too.
  4. Sales & CAC
    Here’s where it gets expensive. To acquire each new customer, vendors pour money into paid search ads (often $20–30 per click for terms like “AI contract review”), cold outbound teams, demo scheduling infrastructure, and enterprise sales cycles. That customer acquisition cost (CAC) has to be recouped—usually through high per-seat pricing and long lock-in periods.
  5. Data Licensing (or Lack Thereof)
    Some vendors train on public data. Others license third-party datasets. Many rely on zero proprietary data and hope the model generalizes well. The tools that actually ground suggestions in precedent require either licensed data or large-scale scraping pipelines—both of which carry real cost, and real legal exposure if done sloppily.

What You’re Really Paying For

The result of all this is a monthly invoice that includes:

  • Model usage fees
  • Cloud infrastructure
  • Onboarding and support headcount
  • CAC amortization
  • (Maybe) real-world data access
  • A profit margin on top

It’s a familiar pattern. The legal tech market, like the wedding industry, suffers from category-based inflation. Add the word “legal,” and everything costs 3–5× more regardless of how complex the underlying product actually is. Just like a flower arrangement becomes a “bridal bouquet” and triples in price, a document summarization engine becomes “AI-powered contract intelligence” and suddenly justifies a $200+ monthly fee.

You’re not always paying for performance. You’re paying for the story wrapped around it.

What It Should Cost

If you’re reviewing standard commercial contracts—NDAs, MSAs, SaaS agreements—you don’t need a concierge onboarding team or a multi-layered reporting suite. You need accurate redlines, fallback suggestions, policy enforcement, and traceability. That’s it.

In a rational market, pricing would reflect:

  • Fair mid-range pricing for solo lawyers or small teams, enough to cover reliable drafting and review without unnecessary add-ons.
  • A reasonable step up for mid-sized teams managing internal playbooks, clause benchmarking, and fallback guidance.
  • Enterprise-level pricing only if the tool includes advanced controls, detailed reporting, portfolio-wide risk visibility, and fully automated playbook management.

Anything significantly above those ranges without enterprise-grade features usually means you’re paying for overhead—not product value.

So Why Do Buyers Tolerate It?

Three reasons:

  1. It’s new territory. Many buyers don’t have a baseline for what’s fair. If the tool works and procurement signs off, they move forward.
  2. The ROI is hard to measure. A tool that saves “4 hours per contract” sounds good until you realize you weren’t spending that time in the first place—or that a junior could do it for less.
  3. Everyone else is doing it. In legal tech, fear of being left behind often beats fear of overpaying. That keeps the inflated pricing cycle alive.

The ‘premium industry’ PR spin doesn’t help. Add the word “legal” to a product and its price triples. Not because it costs more to build, but because vendors know the market will bear it. The result? Legal teams pay too much for tools they’re still not sure how to quantify—because no one wants to admit the emperor might be wearing off-the-rack SaaS.

And Here’s Where the Math Breaks

When you strip out the ad spend, the headcount, and the enterprise bloating, what you’re left with is this: an LLM in a Word doc with a few review rules on top. Valuable? Absolutely. Worth $200 a seat? Only if it includes advanced enterprise features. For most drafting and review use cases, fair pricing should be well below that threshold.

Why SimpleDocs // Law Insider Can Charge Less (And Still Win on Value)

Law Insider didn’t start with AI. It started with contracts – and it started 10 years ago. With 1.2 million monthly visitors and 300,000+ newsletter subscribers, Law Insider already serves the legal community at scale and has an established brand within that community in parallel. Legal professionals come to find contract language, compare clauses, and learn how others negotiate.

That foundation is what now powers SimpleDocs // Law Insider AI. By combining Law Insider’s depth of precedent with SimpleDocs’ drafting and workflow capabilities, the tool delivers explainable, precedent-backed redlines without inflated CAC or hidden overhead. It’s a straightforward model built on contracts and standards—not on bloated sales cycles.

Add in the ability to scale into full CLM via SimpleDocs, and you get a rare thing in legal tech: a tool that’s both affordable and expandable.

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Final Thought

If your AI contract review tool feels overpriced, it probably is. If the vendor can’t tell you exactly what you’re paying for, and why, it’s time to reconsider.

Real value in legal AI doesn’t come from hype. It comes from clarity, precision, and smart economics. That’s what SimpleDocs delivers. Not because it cut corners. But because it never had to build a sales machine to sell you software you didn’t ask for.

Take our AI review for a spin. Book your SimpleDocs demo today and experience AI-powered review backed by Law Insider’s contract standards.

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