Podium Pricing: What Core, Pro, and Signature Actually Cost

Podium publishes two of its three prices. As of publication, Podium's pricing page lists Core at $399/month USD, Pro at $599/month USD, and Signature at "custom pricing." Every tier, including the two with a number on them, routes through a "Talk to Sales" button. There is no self-serve checkout.

Before the details: Podium sells to local businesses with a physical location and a phone that rings. Its own industry list names furniture, appliance, mattress and jewelry retail, HVAC dealers and plumbers, auto dealers and body shops, and med spas, dermatology, plastic surgery and dental offices. If you run a dental practice or a tire shop, that pricing is aimed squarely at you and the rest of this page is just the arithmetic. If you run an online store with no storefront and no phone room, you are reading about a product built for a different business, and the price reflects it.

The three tiers

Core is described as the essential-AI tier: the lead inbox, review management with AI responses, basic automations, basic reporting, the mobile app, 200+ integrations with integration support, and a dedicated customer success manager. Two of the AI features that people assume are included, Automated AI Review Responses and AI Instant Answers, are listed on Core as "Add-on Available" rather than included.

Pro at $599 is the tier Podium marks as best value, and it is where the AI stack fills in. It adds AI Concierge, AI Reputation Specialist, and AI phone call summaries, plus automatic lead routing, advanced automations, hosted and text-based surveys, lead capture forms, advanced customer segmentation, text marketing with images and GIFs, and lower payment processing fees. High-volume carrier-verified messaging, a $15/month line item on Core, is included at Pro.

Signature has no published price. It adds AI Scheduler, AI Salesperson, and AI Marketer, advanced multi-location management, quarterly business reviews, a fraud alert system, custom billing, custom processing rates, and discounts on the phones plan, desk phones, point-of-sale hardware, and high-volume bulk messages. The discount language is the tell: Signature is designed for multi-location operators buying hardware and phone seats in volume, and the price is negotiated against that basket rather than listed.

One footnote appears under all three tiers: HVAC businesses are told to contact sales for applicable pricing. Podium's FAQ repeats the same caveat more broadly, saying monthly cost varies by industry, partnerships, integrations, volume, and carrier fees. So $399 is a starting point on a rate card, not a quote.

What the billing unit actually is

Podium bills per location, per month, at a flat rate. That is the single most important thing to understand about the model, and it is unusual in a market where nearly everything else charges per seat or per conversation.

Contacts are unlimited. One-to-one text messages are unlimited. Conversation history, call recordings and transcripts, and voicemail transcriptions are unlimited. Team members are unlimited on all three tiers. A dealership with 14 people in the store pays the same $399 as a two-person plumbing outfit, which is why Podium reads as expensive to a solo operator and cheap to a 20-person business.

"Unlimited" applies to the seats and the one-to-one messaging. Underneath it, Podium runs a separate set of scope-of-use limits, published in its own pricing FAQ, that meter the things that cost Podium money:

• Automations: 4,000 segments per location per month, of which up to 1,000 may be MMS segments
• Voice AI: 300 minutes per month
• AI Messaging: 1,500 segments per month
• Phones: 1,000 minutes per user per month

Every one of those carries the same footnote: overages billed at Podium's then-current rates. Podium does not publish those rates. So the metered part of the bill is exactly the part you cannot model in advance, and a busy month of automated review requests or AI conversations puts you into a rate you'll first see on an invoice.

Bulk messages work differently again, on expiring credits. Core includes 250 credits a month, Pro includes 500, Signature is custom. Credits do not roll over and expire at the end of each month. When you hit the limit, Podium's FAQ says you cannot send any more bulk messages until the following month unless you contact your customer success manager to upgrade the allotment. The price of additional credits is not published.

The add-ons that move the bill

The $399 and $599 figures cover the software. Several common line items sit outside them.

Phone seats. Podium Phones is priced separately at $30 per user/month for 1 to 4 users, dropping to $25 per user/month at 5 or more, on both Core and Pro. Signature gets unspecified discounts. This is the one genuinely per-seat component of Podium's pricing, and it is the one that scales with headcount.

Network optimization fee. There is a $500 fee per location for Podium Phones. It appears as a footnote under the phones section of the pricing table.

Extra phone numbers. Core includes 5 and Pro includes 15. Every additional number is $5/month.

The 10DLC fee. A base 10DLC fee of $5/month applies to all US locations. That covers 3 message segments per second and up to 2,000 T-Mobile messages per day per location, per Podium's own knowledge base article. This is a carrier pass-through common to every US business texting platform, not a Podium markup, but it is still a line on the invoice.

Carrier-verified messaging. $15/month on Core, included on Pro, custom on Signature.

AI Employee. Podium's marketing puts real weight on this one, the all-in-one AI employee it calls Jerry, which sells, schedules, and communicates day and night. The pricing page says it can be added to any plan and then sends you to a demo request. Podium publishes no price for AI Employee. Given that Pro already includes AI Concierge and AI Reputation Specialist, and Signature adds AI Scheduler, AI Salesperson, and AI Marketer, working out which AI capabilities you are actually buying, and at which tier, is a conversation with a salesperson rather than something you can settle from the pricing page.

What a real bill looks like

Take a single-location auto repair shop with three people answering the phone, on Core, using Podium Phones. Adding up the published figures: $399 for the plan, $90 for three phone seats at $30, $5 for the 10DLC fee, and $15 for carrier-verified messaging comes to $509/month, plus a one-time $500 network optimization fee for the location.

That arithmetic uses only numbers Podium publishes. It excludes anything Podium doesn't price publicly: AI Employee, automation and AI messaging overages, extra bulk message credits, and payment processing rates. The real quote could land meaningfully higher, and for an HVAC business it is explicitly a different rate card.

What Podium does not publish

Worth being precise about the gaps, because a pricing page that guesses at them is worse than one that names them:

• Signature's price. Custom only.
• AI Employee's price. Add-on to any plan, no figure given.
• Overage rates for automations, Voice AI, AI messaging, and phone minutes. All described as "then-current rates."
• Additional bulk message credit pricing. Available through a Bulk Messages plan or add-on, price not listed.
• Payment processing rates. Pro promises "lower payment processing fees" and Signature promises "custom processing rates," with no baseline rate published to compare against.
• Contract length and annual discount. The pricing page shows monthly figures and does not state a term.

None of that is unusual for a sales-led platform serving multi-location businesses. It does mean that anyone trying to budget Podium from the website alone is working with about two-thirds of the picture.

Who this pricing model suits badly

Podium's model rewards a specific shape of business: one physical location, several employees who all need access, high inbound phone and text volume, and reviews that materially drive local search. If that describes you, unlimited seats at a flat $399 is a genuinely good structure and the per-seat tools will cost you more at the same headcount.

It suits three groups badly.

Small multi-location operators. Per-location pricing means a three-shop chain starts at roughly triple the software cost before a single phone seat. The Signature tier exists partly to solve this, which is why it is quoted rather than listed.

Solo and two-person businesses. The unlimited-seats value proposition is worth nothing at one seat. A single-person operation pays the same $399 as the 15-person dealership next door and captures a fraction of the value.

Businesses that only want one piece of it. If you want review generation and nothing else, or a website chat widget and nothing else, you are buying a lead conversion platform, a phone system, a payments product, a text marketing tool, and a review manager, and paying for the bundle. Podium's pitch is consolidation, and consolidation is only a saving if you were about to buy all of it. If reviews are your actual problem, the tactical work of responding to negative reviews well matters more than the platform you do it in.

Ecommerce stores. This is the mismatch that sends most people to a comparison page. An online store has no location to bill per, no phone room, and a customer base that arrives by web chat and email rather than by text to a local number. Podium's SMS-first architecture, phone seats, and Google Business Profile review pipeline are built around a customer who might drive to you. If your customers reach you through your storefront and your inbox, most of what you would pay $399 a month for goes unused. The same logic applies to ManyChat's per-contact pricing from the other direction: strong for the channel it was built around, awkward for anything else.

If you landed here running an online store

Ernest is an AI support, sales, and product agent for Shopify and WooCommerce stores. It answers order status, returns, cancellations, shipping, sizing, stock and policy questions, grounded in the store's real policies and live order data, on the storefront chat widget and by email.

Ernest does not do what Podium does on the messaging side. There is no SMS, no phone system, no voice AI, no review generation, and no Google Business Profile integration. If your business needs customers to text a local number and leave Google reviews, Podium covers ground Ernest does not attempt, and switching would cost you the channel entirely.

Where the models differ is the billing unit. Podium charges per location, per month, at $399 for Core and $599 for Pro as of publication, with phone seats billed separately at $30 or $25 per user per month. Ernest charges by conversation volume: a free plan with 100 conversations that never expire, then $49/month for 500 conversations, $149/month for 2,000, and $299/month for 10,000. AI is included at every tier, with no per-seat fee. Those two structures are not interchangeable, and a store choosing between them is really choosing whether its support happens over text and phone or over web chat and email.

For the wider field of tools aimed at small teams rather than local storefronts, our roundup of customer service software for small business covers what else is worth a look.

All Podium figures on this page come from Podium's public pricing page and its pricing FAQ as of publication. Podium states that plans vary by industry, volume, and carrier fees, so treat the published numbers as a floor and get a quote before budgeting against them.