Legal intake software pricing: what legal intake software costs, and what Clio Grow, Lawmatics, Lead Docket and Captorra actually publish

Read the pricing pages in this category back to back and a clean split appears. The tools built specifically for legal intake and legal CRM disclose no prices whatsoever. The broad practice management platforms, which treat intake as one module among billing, matters and trust accounting, publish complete rate cards with every tier priced.

On 10 August 2026 the specialist side looked like this. Lead Docket offers a quote form and a demo booking, and states that pricing is tailored, with no figure anywhere on the page. Lawmatics names three plans, Essential, Premium and Enterprise, with a three user minimum on the first two and five on Enterprise, and attaches no price to any of them. Intaker no longer has a working pricing page at all, and its site carries no dollar figure. Captorra is the most telling of the four: the page at its pricing URL is an article headed The 6 Best Legal Case Management Software for 2021, with a phone number and a demo form and not one price.

Clio sits between the two camps and is worth reading carefully, because it is the vendor most people check first. Its pricing page names four plans, Starter, Core, Signature and Elite, and publishes a single number for all of them: plans start at $49 per user per month. Each individual tier carries a Get pricing button instead of a figure. Clio Grow, the intake and CRM product that most people are actually shopping for when they land there, is an optional add-on: re-read on 19 August 2026 it is included in Elite and Elite Work and available as an add-on for Core and Signature, but not available on Starter at all. Its standalone price is a Get pricing link on every route, so the entry plan behind the $49 figure is also the one plan that cannot run intake. So the most searched product in legal intake has no published price, and the plan names have changed, which matters because a great many articles still describe Clio plans using the older EasyStart, Essentials, Advanced and Complete labels that the page no longer uses.

The consequence for a buyer is that half this market cannot be compared from a browser at all, and the half that can is not the half most legal intake searches are aiming at. That is worth knowing before you spend an afternoon looking for a table that does not exist.

Price transparency in software normally moves one way over time, because publishing rates is a competitive weapon for whoever is cheapest. Legal intake is moving the other way, and we have a dated record of it rather than an impression.

When we read the Lawmatics site on 24 July 2026, its lead scoring product was called QualifyAI and its credit pricing was fully published: 50 credits for $150 a month, 100 for $250, 200 for $400, 350 for $600 and 500 for $750, with overage running from $4.00 down to $1.50 per credit and one credit consumed per lead scored. Reading the same site on 10 August 2026, that product is presented as Merlin Qualify, it is still described as credit based, and no rate appears anywhere. In seventeen days the only published unit price in legal intake software disappeared.

We are not going to guess at what replaced it, and neither should anything else you read. If a page tells you Lawmatics costs a specific amount today, ask where that came from, because the vendor is not saying. The same discipline applies to the figure of about eighty dollars that circulates widely for Intaker: it traces back to a post Intaker itself published in January 2023, and repeating a three year old number as current pricing is how this whole category ended up misdescribed.

There is a practical reading of all this that has nothing to do with cynicism. Quote only pricing usually signals that the vendor expects the deal to be configured, that implementation and training are a real part of the cost, and that what you pay depends on negotiation. None of those are scandals. They do mean that budgeting from a website is impossible, and that you should get the total first year cost in writing, including setup, before comparing anything to a published monthly rate.

Where prices are published, the advertised entry plan almost never includes intake. This is the same tier gating that catches buyers comparing form tools on HIPAA coverage, and in legal practice management it is consistent enough to treat as a rule.

PracticePanther publishes four tiers per user per month: Solo at $59, Essential at $79, Business at $99 and Business Pro at $124, with annual billing taking those to $49, $69, $89 and $114. Intake Forms appear in the Business feature list. So the plan that turns intake on is $99 a month per user, not the $49 in the page headline, a difference of roughly double before you count a single extra seat.

MyCase follows the same shape. Basic is $60 per user per month, or $50 on annual billing. Pro is $120, or $100 annual. Advanced is $150, or $130 annual. Client Intake Forms and Legal CRM are listed under Pro. So intake begins at $100 per user per month on annual billing, again roughly double the entry figure. MyCase Accounting is a further $39 per user per month if you want it, while LawPay payments carry no monthly fee.

Clio takes the pattern furthest. Clio Grow is included in Elite and Elite Work only, which are the top of the range, and neither the Elite price nor a standalone Grow price is published. A firm that wants Clio specifically for intake therefore cannot calculate anything at all from the website, even though the site does display a starting price. Comparing that $49 starting figure against a competitor plan that includes intake is not a comparison of like with like.

Nearly every published price in this category is per user per month, and that unit deserves more scrutiny than it gets. Intake software handles inquiries. The number of inquiries a firm receives is set by its marketing, its referral sources and its reputation. It is not set by how many attorneys the firm employs, and the two numbers move independently. Per user billing charges you on the axis that has nothing to do with the workload.

The arithmetic is easy to run and rarely run. Take a six person firm on the cheapest tier that includes intake. MyCase Pro at $100 per user per month on annual billing is $600 a month, or $7,200 a year. PracticePanther Business at $89 annual is $534 a month. Grow to twelve people and the same software, doing the same job on the same lead volume, costs $1,200 and $1,068 a month respectively. Nothing about the intake process changed. You hired six people.

It runs the other way too, and this is the part that catches growing firms by surprise. A two person firm pays $200 a month on MyCase Pro and feels fine about it. The per user model is genuinely cheap when you are small, which is exactly why it is chosen, and the cost curve only becomes uncomfortable at the point when hiring is supposed to be good news. Any structure other than flat billing charges you more for succeeding: per user grows with hiring, per minute grows with marketing, per credit grows with both.

We price Consultations flat per firm at $49, $129 or $299 a month, which is why we keep pointing at this. That is a commercial position, not a neutral observation, and you should weigh it as one. The honest version of the comparison is this: if your firm is small and static, per user pricing may well cost you less than we do, and MyCase or PracticePanther will also give you billing, trust accounting and matter management that we do not attempt. If your headcount is growing, or your lead volume swings, the unit you are billed on matters more than the rate.

Since most of this market will not publish, the useful skill is extracting a comparable figure from a sales conversation. Ask for it in writing, and ask for the same things from every vendor, because a quote that omits implementation is not comparable to one that includes it.

Start with total first year cost, expressed as a single number, including licence, setup, implementation, data migration, training and any minimum term. Vendors quote monthly per user because it sounds small, and the first year is where onboarding and migration land. Then ask what the price becomes in year two, since introductory discounting is common and renewal is where it unwinds.

Then pin the unit and the minimums. How many users must be licensed at minimum, and does that include paralegals, intake staff and administrators or only attorneys. Lawmatics publishes a three user minimum on its lower plans and five on Enterprise, which is a real floor even though the rate is not published. Ask what happens when you add a seat mid term, and whether seats can be removed at renewal or only added.

Finally, ask what is excluded. In this category the usual answers are text messaging, e-signature volume, additional intake forms, integrations with your phone system or case management platform, API access, and anything described as AI. Get the answer for the specific tier being quoted, not the product in general, and get the exclusions listed rather than confirmed in the negative.