Total cost of ownership
One subscription vs. three full-time hires.
A typical enterprise RFP touches data protection, legal, and technical architecture. Staffing that internally means a DPO, a Legal Counsel, and a Sales/Software Engineer. Here is what each route actually costs per year.
Role
Base salary (midpoint)
Fully loaded*
Data Protection Officer
Owns GDPR, DPA reviews, data residency questions, and customer security questionnaires.
$145,000
$203,000
Legal Counsel
Reviews NDAs, MSAs, vendor terms, and answers the legal/contractual sections of every RFP.
$175,000
$245,000
Software Engineer (Sales Eng.)
Answers technical/architecture questions: infra, SSO, APIs, uptime, integrations, security controls.
$155,000
$217,000
In-house team total
$475,000
$665,000
per year
* Fully loaded = base × 1.4 to cover benefits, employer payroll tax, equipment, software, and allocated office cost.
In-house team
$665,000
per year, fully loaded
- Deep institutional knowledge
- Recruiting cycle: 3–9 months per hire
- Answers gated by individual availability
- Costs continue during slow RFP quarters
- Knowledge walks out the door at attrition
RFP Genius · Starter
$6,710
per year ($699/mo, billed annually)
- Live in days, not quarters
- Answers grounded in your locked knowledge base
- Scales to unlimited concurrent RFPs
- EU / US / APAC data residency, no LLM training
- Knowledge persists across team changes
Salary midpoints sourced from public market data (Glassdoor, Levels.fyi, Robert Half 2024–2025) for major US and EU metros. Your local market may vary — adjust the loaded multiplier to match your finance team's standard. RFP Genius pricing shown starts at $699/month on the Starter tier (annual billing -20%); volume and multi-year discounts available.