Cinema software pricing: from $200 to $20,000 a year

By screens, and nothing else that matters. The annual price scales with the number of screens you operate. A single-screen town cinema starts at $200 a year. A multi-site circuit sits towards the top of the range at up to $20,000 a year. Everything in between is priced on the same scale, so a cinema that adds a screen knows what it adds to the bill before it asks.

Festivals are priced on the size of the edition — screenings, venues, passes and accreditation. A mid-size international festival with a public programme and an industry section pays about $5,000 a year, and the site rolls forward from one edition to the next rather than being rebuilt and re-bought.

Setup is fast. If we already integrate your box office and payment provider, you are typically live within a few weeks. If we need to build a new integration for your provider, allow about a month. Either way, you can see your own cinema running on Filmgrail before you talk to anyone — build a free prototype of your website from your current address.

Compare that with what the big platforms charge a mid-size cinema, and with how long their implementations take. Then ask us for your exact number.

Almost every vendor in this market prices in two parts. Filmgrail does not: we charge one flat annual price per screen, with no per-ticket fee and no percentage of your sales.

A platform fee. A recurring charge, usually monthly or annual, covering the software itself, hosting, updates, support and the apps in the stores. It normally scales with the size of the operation, most often by screen count or by site.

A transaction fee. A per-ticket amount or a percentage of the online sale. This is where a vendor's revenue tracks your success, and it is also where two quotes that look similar can diverge enormously once you put real volume through them.

On top of those there is usually a one-off implementation charge covering the integration with your box office, the design and build, content migration and launch. Whether that is a large number or a small one depends almost entirely on what your existing box office system exposes.

Because the honest number depends on things we cannot know from a form: which box office system you run, what it exposes, how many screens, how much of the platform you want, what volume goes through it and which market you operate in.

What you get instead is specific. Book a demo, we run a session against your own programme, and afterwards you receive a written cost assessment for your cinema and a three-year return-on-investment estimate. Both are free, both are yours to circulate internally, and neither obliges you to anything. Most cinemas take the ROI estimate into the budget conversation before there is a budget line at all.

If what you need right now is a rough order of magnitude for a board paper, say so in the demo request and we will give you a range for your screen count before the session rather than after it.

Not the fee. The delta.

Cinema software is one of the few operating costs that is supposed to increase revenue, so the only sensible way to evaluate it is against what it moves: online share of total admissions, checkout completion rate, repeat visit frequency, and spend per moviegoer once loyalty and concession pre-order are in play.

Across cinemas on this platform, nine out of ten end users create a profile, engagement runs about four times the industry benchmark for standard ticketing sites and apps, and the average yearly increase in digital ticket sales is 89%. Those are our published figures and you should treat them the way you would treat any vendor's: as a reason to test it on your own cinema with a free prototype, not as a forecast for yours.

Run the arithmetic on your own admissions. If a realistic improvement in online share and repeat frequency does not clear the annual cost by a comfortable margin, do not buy it from us or from anybody else.