About ERPfm
What’s actually on this site
ERPfm is an independent, advertising-supported website built around six free ERP calculators and a set of guides on planning, budgeting, and running an implementation. There’s no membership, no gated content, and no sales team behind it — just tools built to answer the specific numbers that come up when you’re scoping business software. Here’s a walk through what each one does.
Sizing the investment: ROI and total cost
The ERP ROI Calculatortakes an annual benefit, a total investment, and a time horizon, and turns them into a cumulative benefit, a net benefit, an ROI percentage, and a payback period in months — the numbers you need to argue a project is worth doing.
The ERP TCO Calculator answers the other half of that question: it adds licence, implementation, and training costs to recurring annual maintenance across your ownership horizon, and returns the total cost of ownership plus the average cost per year. Run the two together and you get both what a system returns and what it actually costs to keep.
Pricing the licence and the seat
The Software License Cost Calculator prices a per-seat SaaS or ERP subscription from the cost per user per month, the number of users, and the term, plus any one-off setup fee — it gives you the monthly cost, the subscription cost, and the all-in total.
The Cost Per User Calculator works from the other direction: divide a total software or ERP cost across your users to see the cost per user, and, with a term added, the cost per user per month, so you can benchmark what you’re paying against list prices.
Weighing deployment and downtime risk
The Cloud vs On-Premises Cost Calculator compares an on-premises deployment’s upfront cost plus its annual operating cost against a flat monthly cloud fee over your horizon, and tells you each total, which is cheaper, and by how much.
The IT Downtime Cost Calculator estimates what an outage actually costs, from revenue per hour, downtime duration, the share of productivity lost, and any recovery cost, down to the revenue and productivity loss and the total incident cost. It’s the number that usually gets left out of the cloud-versus-on-prem debate, even though it belongs in it.
Beyond the calculators
Alongside the tools, ERPfm publishes blog articles and guides on ERP planning, budgeting, licensing, and deployment, and runs a Business & Computing Museum— a set of galleries on the business machines and mainframes that ran companies for a century, the computer age that transformed them, the data and automation of modern operations, and the factories and supply chains that ERP runs today. Every entry in the museum is drawn from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.
What this site is — and isn’t
ERPfm is independent and not affiliated with any ERP vendor, consultancy, or software brand its calculators or guides happen to reference. It’s funded by on-page advertising, not subscriptions or sponsored placements, which is why the tools stay free with no account required.
Every calculator here works from the numbers you enter and standard formulas — ROI, TCO, per-seat pricing, cost comparisons, downtime cost — and returns an estimate, not a quote. None of it is professional financial, IT, or legal advice, and none of it should replace an actual vendor quote or a conversation with a qualified consultant before you commit budget to an implementation. If something looks off, or you think a calculator is missing, the contact page is the way to tell us.