Most pages about this either refuse to name a number or invent one. Here are the prices vendors actually publish as of July 2026, what the manual version costs using federal wage data, and the volume below which none of it is worth buying.

The four ways to buy it

Almost every firm ends up on one of four routes, and they are priced so differently that comparing them by monthly fee alone will mislead you.

Add intake to the case management software you already pay for. Usually the cheapest real option, because you are already paying for the platform and the data stays in one place.

Buy a dedicated intake and CRM platform. Stronger at marketing automation and lead nurture. This is the group that mostly refuses to publish pricing.

Build it yourself on no-code tools. Cheapest on paper. The cost that bites is your own time, both to build it and to keep it running.

Have it built as custom software. Highest up front, and the only route that touches work the others cannot do at all.

What the software actually costs

Everything here is from the vendor's own pricing page, checked July 2026. Where a vendor does not publish, it says so, because a made-up number is worse than no number.

Product Published price Intake included?
Clio Manage $49 / $89 / $119 / $149 per user per month No, Grow is separate
Clio Grow $59 per user per month, included in Expand Yes, this is the intake product
MyCase $50 / $100 / $130 per user per month Yes, from the Pro tier
CASEpeer $79 / $119 / $149 per user per month Yes, from the Pro tier
Lawmatics Not published, contact sales Yes
Law Ruler Not published, plus a one-time onboarding fee Yes
Captorra Not published Yes
Filevine Not published, custom quote only Yes, separate module
Smokeball From $149 per month, per-user rate not published Add-on, included in Prosper+
Zapier Free at 100 tasks, then from $19.99 per month You build it
n8n Cloud From about 20 euro per month at 2,500 executions You build it

Clio's per-user figures are the annual billing rates, and they are published inside the FAQ on its pricing page rather than in the plan table itself. The top tier is now called Expand, so any article quoting a "Complete" plan is out of date.

Two things to ask any vendor who will not publish a rate: what is the one-time onboarding fee, and what is the contract term. Law Ruler's own page states an onboarding fee on every tier. Smokeball's states twelve or thirty-six month terms. Neither is unusual, and both are easy to sign without noticing.

Why per-seat pricing gets expensive quietly

Per user per month sounds small and scales badly. Ten people on Clio Advanced with Grow is $178 per user per month, roughly $21,000 a year, and every hire adds to it. That is the structural argument for owning your automation rather than renting seats, and it is worth modelling honestly before you commit either way.

What the manual version costs

This is the number most firms never work out, and it is the only one that tells you whether any of the above is worth buying.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median paralegal at $30.24 an hour and the median legal secretary or administrative assistant at $26.72 an hour (OEWS, May 2025). Wages are not the whole cost. BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation for March 2026 puts benefits at 30.1 percent of total compensation in private industry, which is a 1.43 multiplier on wages.

Role BLS median wage Loaded at 1.43x
Paralegal $30.24 / hr about $43 / hr
Legal secretary or admin $26.72 / hr about $38 / hr

That multiplier covers employer-paid benefits and payroll taxes only. It does not include office space, software seats, recruiting, or the time a manager spends supervising. Business cases often use 1.7x to 2.0x for that reason, which is defensible, but label it as your own assumption rather than as BLS.

Then the arithmetic. Take the hours your team spends on intake admin each week, multiply by the loaded rate, multiply by 52:

  • 5 hours a week of paralegal time: about $11,200 a year
  • 10 hours a week: about $22,400 a year
  • 20 hours a week: about $44,700 a year
  • A full-time intake coordinator at the legal admin rate: about $79,000 a year

Put your own hours in. That figure is what you are comparing the software against, and it is usually larger than partners expect, because intake admin is spread across several people in fifteen-minute pieces rather than sitting in one job description.

The cost nobody counts

There is a second number, and at most firms it is bigger than the first: the cases you do not sign because nobody answered fast enough. Whatever your intake conversion rate is, the gap between a lead arriving and a human responding moves it. If you know your average case value and your inquiry volume, one point of conversion is usually worth more than the entire software bill. That comparison, not the monthly fee, is the one that should decide this.

What a year actually costs, all in

Monthly fees are the number vendors compete on and the least useful one, because the software bill is rarely the biggest line. Here is a full first year for the same firm down each route.

The firm: ten people, three of whom touch intake, roughly sixty new inquiries a month, currently spending about ten hours a week on intake admin. Change the inputs to match yours, the shape holds.

DIY on no-code Intake platform Custom build
Software, year one $240 to $590 $2,124 (3 seats of Clio Grow) none after build
Build or setup your own time onboarding fee, often unpublished $5,000 to $15,000 advertised
Your time to build it ~40 hrs, about $1,720 ~15 hrs config, about $645 ~10 hrs of your input, about $430
Keeping it running ~2 hrs/mo, about $1,030 included, plus admin time 15 to 25 percent of build
Year one, before labour saved about $3,000 to $3,300 about $2,800 plus onboarding about $6,200 to $19,200

Now the line that decides it. That same firm is spending roughly $22,400 a year on the intake admin itself, at ten hours a week and the $43 loaded paralegal rate from above.

So every route on that table costs less than the manual work it replaces, which is exactly why "what does it cost" is the wrong question. The right one is what fraction of those ten hours each route actually removes. No-code typically takes the tidy half and leaves the exceptions, the scanned documents and the chasing, which is where most of the hours are. That is why the cheapest row often changes the bill and not the workload.

Two things to be honest about in that table. The onboarding fees on the platform route are real and unpublished, so that column is the least certain. And the custom range is advertised pricing, not survey data, so treat the top of it as a ceiling rather than a quote.

What custom development costs

Straight answer: this part of the market does not publish, and anyone quoting a precise industry average is making it up. There is no credible survey behind the numbers that circulate.

What automation agencies advertise, offered as advertising rather than fact, is roughly $75 to $200 an hour for experienced work and $5,000 to $15,000 for a single production workflow. Ongoing maintenance is commonly quoted at 15 to 25 percent of build cost a year.

We price differently, and not out of generosity. We agree a specific, measurable result before anything is built, write that result and the way it is measured into the agreement, and if the system misses the number, there is no bill and you keep what was built. The reason is the section above: the only sane way to price this is against what the manual work is costing you now, and that number is different at every firm.

When none of this is worth buying

Two clear cases, and they disqualify a fair share of firms.

Below about twenty new inquiries a month, the maths usually fails. The time saved is smaller than the time spent building and maintaining the thing, and the money is better spent getting more inquiries in the first place.

If your process is still changing every month, wait. Encoding a workflow you are about to redesign is the most common way firms end up with automation nobody trusts and everybody works around.

The rough test is whether the same task happens often enough that somebody would describe it as "the thing I do all morning." Below that, keep doing it by hand.

Working out your own number

Three steps, and you can do all of them before talking to anyone.

  1. Count the hours. For one week, everyone who touches intake writes down the minutes. Do not estimate from memory, it is always wrong and usually low.
  2. Price them. Multiply by the loaded rate above, or your actual loaded cost if you know it, and annualise.
  3. Add the conversion gap. Take your inquiry volume, your current conversion rate and your average case value, then ask what one point of conversion is worth.

That total is your budget ceiling and your honest comparison. Anything that costs less and reliably works is a good buy, whichever of the four routes it comes from.

If you want a second pair of eyes on it, book a free operations audit. Half an hour through your actual workflow, and you leave with the write-up and the numbers whether you ever hire us or not. If Clio is your system, what a Clio automation consultant does covers what its API will and will not reach.

Common questions

How much does legal intake automation cost?

It depends which of the four routes you buy. Adding intake to case management you already pay for is cheapest: Clio Grow is $59 per user per month on top of Clio Manage, MyCase includes intake in its Pro tier at $100 per user per month billed annually, and CASEpeer includes it from $119. Dedicated intake platforms like Lawmatics, Law Ruler and Captorra do not publish pricing at all. A DIY no-code setup on Zapier starts around $20 a month plus your own time. Custom development is quoted per project.

How much does Clio cost?

Clio Manage publishes four tiers on annual billing: EasyStart $49, Essentials $89, Advanced $119 and Expand $149 per user per month. Clio Grow is $59 per user per month added to Essentials or Advanced, and is included in Expand. Those are the rates on Clio's own pricing page as of July 2026.

Why do so many legal intake vendors hide their pricing?

Lawmatics, Law Ruler, Captorra and Filevine all require you to contact sales. Usually that means price varies with firm size, user count and onboarding, and often there is a one-time implementation fee on top. Ask for the onboarding fee and the contract term on the first call.

What does it cost to keep doing intake manually?

Use real wage data rather than a guess. BLS puts the median paralegal at $30.24 an hour and the median legal secretary at $26.72, as of May 2025. Employer benefits and payroll taxes add about 43 percent, so a paralegal is roughly $43 an hour loaded. Ten hours a week of intake admin is therefore about $22,000 a year, before office space or software seats.

At what point is intake automation not worth it?

Below roughly twenty new inquiries a month the numbers rarely work, because the time saved is smaller than the time spent maintaining it. The other case is a firm whose process is still changing every month, where automating now produces something nobody trusts.

What does custom automation development cost?

This part of the market does not publish real figures, and anyone quoting a precise industry average is guessing. Agencies advertise roughly $75 to $200 an hour and $5,000 to $15,000 for a single workflow. We price against a measurable result written into the agreement instead, so if the system misses the number there is no bill.

Sources