What evidence management software actually costs in 2026 (real numbers)

Ask an evidence software vendor what their product costs and you will usually get a demo invitation instead of a number. Almost nobody in this market publishes pricing. But agencies buy with public money, so the numbers surface anyway — in state contract price lists, city council agenda packets, and procurement disclosures. Here is what the market actually charges, with the receipts, and why we priced Kinode Casefile the way we did.

The per-user cloud platforms

Axon Evidence is the market anchor, and it is sold the way body cameras are sold: per officer, per year, on multi-year contracts. South Carolina's state contract price list shows Evidence.com user licenses at roughly $180 per user per year for basic access and $468 per user per year for Pro, with department-wide storage sold separately — one line item alone runs $57,600 a year. Bundled with hardware, the totals get dramatic: a 44-officer Kansas department's council approved about $362,000 per year across a decade-long Axon package, and council reporting in Arizona documents renewal bills that multiplied at contract rollover. None of this is hidden — it is just in the council packet instead of on the website.

Kaseware, an investigative platform with a real evidence module, is one of the few vendors with published pricing: $102 to $216 per user per month with a 20-user minimum. That makes the cheapest possible Kaseware deployment about $24,000 a year, and a 50-seat agency roughly $61,000 a year at list.

Cellebrite Guardian and NICE Evidencentral are quote-only in the US. Both are strong digital-evidence platforms, and both are enterprise sales motions: Guardian is priced by terabytes uploaded on an annual subscription, and the only public NICE rate card we found — the UK government's G-Cloud marketplace — lists the equivalent of roughly $165 to $320 per user per year before services.

The property-room incumbents

On the physical-evidence side, Tracker Products' SAFE publishes $4,300 per year per concurrent login — unlimited named staff, but every simultaneous user is another license. A property room with two or three people working at once lands around $8,600 to $12,900 a year, before eDiscovery. PMI Evidence Tracker takes the opposite approach: a one-time purchase between $3,450 and $8,790 including barcode hardware — but it is a Windows client-server application with no cloud access, no prosecutor sharing, and no published CJIS posture, and the annual support renewal price is not published at all. Evidence Hound, the other barcode veteran, publishes no pricing and still advertises handhelds running Windows Mobile 6, an operating system that reached end of life more than a decade ago.

What none of the affordable options do

Here is the gap that surprised us: not one vendor in the property-room price class has a real answer for two questions every defense attorney and every auditor asks. First — who has viewed this evidence? Access auditing at the view level (not just custody transactions) is an enterprise-platform feature in this market. Second — how does the case file get to the district attorney? For the affordable tier, the honest answer is still discs, drives, and hand deliveries. Prosecutor sharing portals exist almost exclusively in the five-figure cloud platforms.

How Kinode Casefile is priced

Kinode Casefile is $99 per month, flat, per agency. That is the entire pricing page. Unlimited users — a two-officer campus department and a metro sheriff's office pay the same. Unlimited evidence items and cases. Digital check-in and check-out with a hash-chained, tamper-evident chain of custody. A who-viewed audit trail on every item, covering your own people and outside viewers alike. Secure, expiring, revocable share links that put a case in the DA's browser in under a minute, with every view logged. QR labels, court-ready custody reports, and full CSV exports for audits. There are no tiers, no per-user math, no storage surcharges, and no quote call — $1,188 a year, cancel anytime.

Against the market: that is about a quarter of Tracker SAFE's realistic two-license cost, about five percent of Kaseware's floor, and a rounding error against an Axon bundle — with view-level auditing and prosecutor sharing that the affordable tier simply does not offer. And unlike a one-time Windows install, it is a living web product your whole agency signs into from anywhere, with MFA available on every account.

Why flat pricing matters in public safety

Per-user pricing quietly taxes growth: hire officers, pay more; add a records clerk, pay more; let the DA's investigator in, pay more. Agencies respond rationally — they share logins, which destroys the audit trail the software was supposed to provide. A flat agency price removes the incentive to cut corners on accountability. Every person gets their own account, their own permissions, and their own line in the audit log, because adding them costs nothing.

Prices cited for other products are drawn from vendor websites, state contract price lists, and public council records as of August 2026; check current figures with each vendor. Casefile's price is on this page because we think that is how selling to public agencies should work.