How much should a broker actually spend on software each month?

There is no published benchmark, so be careful who you believe

Search for how much a mortgage broker should spend on software and you will find percentages. Two per cent of revenue. Five per cent. Ten. None of those figures come from published Australian broking data. The MFAA's Industry Intelligence Service reports broker numbers, settlement volumes, conversion rates and remuneration. It does not publish a technology spend benchmark. Neither does the FBAA. When a vendor or a coach quotes you an industry average, ask where the number came from before you use it to justify anything.

What we do have is revenue data, and it is enough to work with. Mortgage Professional Australia, reporting in September 2024 on the seventeenth edition of the MFAA Industry Intelligence Service covering 1 April to 30 September 2023, put average total annual broker commission before costs at $192,354, made up of $117,142 in upfront and $75,212 in trail. That average includes part-timers and first-year brokers, so it is a rough anchor rather than a target. It still tells you the order of magnitude you are budgeting against.

The second anchor is channel health. Broker Daily reported in June 2026 that broker share of new residential home lending reached 81 per cent in the March 2026 quarter, with leading aggregators settling $124.88 billion, up $25.51 billion on the same quarter a year earlier. Brokers write four in five home loans in this country. The channel is not short of demand. The pressure sits on margin and on cost per file, which is exactly where software lands.

Work backwards from one settled loan

The only budget test that survives contact with a real broking business is this one. What does this tool need to produce to pay for itself, and is that plausible?

Take a tool at $99 a month. That is $1,188 a year plus GST. Set against the $117,142 average annual upfront commission in the seventeenth IIS, that subscription is a little over one per cent of upfront income. Against total remuneration of $192,354 it is about 0.6 per cent. So the question is never whether $99 a month is expensive in the abstract. It is whether the tool plausibly wins you one more settlement a year, prevents one clawback, or clears enough admin to fit one more appointment into the week.

This changes the conversation. Software is not an overhead to be minimised. It is a variable input you either justify or cut. Most brokers who feel overspent are not spending too much in total. They are paying for three or four tools that fail this test and one or two that pass it easily, and they have never separated the two.

Split the bill into three layers before you argue about the total

Layer one is the cost of being licensed and aggregated. Aggregator fees, credit representative fees, professional indemnity, association membership, ASIC's industry funding levy. You do not review this monthly. You review it when you renegotiate or change aggregator, and it is usually the largest number on the page.

Layer two is what your aggregator already gives you. Connective bundles Mercury Nexus with membership. AFG bundles Suite360. LMG has MyCRM and Finsure has Infynity. These platforms are included in your fees. They also stay behind if you move, which is a real switching cost that rarely appears in any comparison.

Layer three is what you choose and pay for separately. Serviceability tools, a workflow layer over the aggregator CRM, document collection, e-signature, client retention. This is the only layer where a monthly budget conversation is useful, and it is usually much smaller than brokers assume once it is isolated.

Add up your whole monthly outflow, call it a software bill, and you will end up angry at the wrong line item. Most of what feels like software cost is licensing and aggregation.

What published prices actually looked like in August 2026

Here is what we could verify on vendors' own public pricing pages on 17 August 2026. Finance OS, which publishes this site, has not tested any of these products. These are published prices, not assessments.

Quickli publishes two plans. Its pricing page shows Core at $590 per user per year plus GST and Pro at $990 per user per year plus GST, with lower figures of $530 and $930 displayed alongside an introductory offer, and monthly billing available at a higher rate. AutoCalc publishes a free tier covering 12 lenders, a Standard plan at $49 plus GST a month covering 27 or more lenders, and a Pro plan at $99 plus GST a month with five logins.

BrokerEngine publishes per-user monthly pricing inclusive of GST. For brokers outside AFG it lists $163.90 per broker user per month, or $136.58 on annual billing, with support users at $108.90 and $90.75. AFG brokers are quoted a separate BrokerEngine Plus rate of $220 and $184. A one-off Kickstart onboarding fee of $1,000 plus GST per broker group applies, and the page states there are no fixed-term lock-in contracts.

Salestrekker publishes $99.99 per user per month plus GST for a Broker Support seat and $249.99 per user per month plus GST for Premium Broker, with Enterprise listed as price on application. Annature publishes electronic signatures at $1.75 per envelope, with unlimited documents and recipients inside each envelope, plus $0.12 per SMS. Content Snare publishes document collection from US$35 a month on annual billing and states that Australian customers are charged GST.

The pattern is worth naming. A single serviceability subscription and a single workflow CRM, both bought at published rates, land well under $200 a month for one broker. That is the real shape of layer three for a solo operator.

Annual billing, GST and the two traps in the fine print

Two things distort every software comparison in this market. The first is GST treatment. BrokerEngine publishes prices inclusive of GST. Quickli, Salestrekker and AutoCalc publish theirs exclusive of GST. That is a ten per cent gap sitting silently between two numbers that look comparable. Normalise everything to one basis before you compare.

The second is billing period. BrokerEngine's published annual rate is around sixteen per cent below its monthly rate. Quickli's headline figures are annual. Compare one vendor's annual rate against another's monthly rate and you will get the ranking wrong. Convert everything to an annual figure excluding GST, then compare.

Annual billing is not automatically the right choice. It is a discount in exchange for you carrying the risk that the tool stops being useful in month three. For a tool you have used for a year, take the discount. For a tool you are still evaluating, pay monthly and treat the premium as the price of being able to leave.

Where the price is hidden, and why that matters

Not every vendor publishes. When we checked afgonline.com.au on 17 August 2026 there was no pricing page, and product pages route to a call or a demo. Salestrekker publishes its two standard tiers but lists Enterprise as price on application. BrokerEngine publishes standard rates but states that volume discounts for groups of ten or more require a conversation with sales. Sherlok's site had no pricing page in its navigation when we checked, and a previously indexed pricing URL returned a 404.

Hidden pricing is not automatically a red flag. Aggregator economics genuinely vary with volume, panel access and support, and enterprise deals are negotiated everywhere. But it has a cost you should price in. You cannot compare on your own time, you cannot budget before a sales conversation, and you have no way of knowing whether the number you are quoted is the number the broker down the road pays.

The practical response is to ask for the fee schedule in writing before the demo, not after. If a vendor will not put a number in an email, that tells you something about how the negotiation will go at renewal.

The cost that never appears on an invoice

The largest software cost in a broking business is usually rework. Mortgage Professional Australia, reporting in June 2025 on the nineteenth edition of the MFAA Industry Intelligence Service, recorded a broker conversion rate of 76.1 per cent, down from 78.1 per cent a year earlier and well below the 87.3 per cent peak reached in mid-2022. The article pointed to a more competitive lending environment, tighter credit assessment and market saturation, with broker numbers above 22,000 and around 15 per cent of that population inactive.

Roughly one application in four does not settle. Every point of conversion you lose is work you did and did not get paid for. If a $50 a month tool moves your conversion by even a fraction of a point across a year of files, the arithmetic is not close. If a $250 a month tool adds another dashboard nobody opens, the arithmetic is also not close, in the other direction.

This is why per-seat price is a poor way to rank tools. Rank them by the failure they remove.

Four questions for every line on the bill

One. What specific step does this remove, and can you name the step? If the answer is a category rather than a step, you are paying for a feeling.

Two. Who else touches it? A tool only you use has a ceiling on its value. A tool your support person, your client and the assessor all touch compounds.

Three. What happens to the data if you cancel? Aggregator platforms hold your file history under your membership. Third party tools vary. Ask before you migrate anything that forms part of your compliance record into them.

Four. Would you buy it again today at the current price? Most subscription waste is not a bad purchase. It is a good purchase that nobody re-examined after the trial ended.

What to actually do at renewal

Put every subscription on one page with its renewal date, its annual cost normalised to exclude GST, and the one step it removes. Do it once a year, in the same week each year. The page is the discipline, not the spreadsheet.

Then cut on evidence, not on price. The cheapest line on your bill might be doing the most work, and the most expensive might be an aggregator fee you cannot avoid without restructuring your whole business. Sorting by cost tells you almost nothing about what to remove.

Broker Daily reported in January 2026 that Broker Essentials founder Jason Back expected brokers to move from window shopping with technology in 2025 to actually making a purchase in 2026, and argued against individual brokers building their own tools rather than adopting proven ones. That is a reasonable frame. The discipline is not spending less. It is deciding once a year, deliberately, rather than accumulating subscriptions by default.