Add up your software invoices. Planning engine, tax tool, risk questionnaire, proposal generator, reporting platform, client portal. For many practices the total runs past $1,000 per advisor per month. If you're a larger firm with dozens (or hundreds) of advisors, your annual software spend can reach seven figures.
We have spent the last few years building this kind of software with advanced AI models, and that experience has led us to a conclusion we hold with real conviction: most of that software is heading to a price of zero. In fact, we believe the economics already support zero today, which is why RK Sterling charges nothing for it.
We know how that sounds. So rather than assert it, we want to walk through what we have seen firsthand, why we think the pricing follows, and what it could mean for your practice. The short version is encouraging: quality is going up while cost is going down, and financial advisors stand to benefit on both sides of the equation.
What We See Building Software Every Day
We work with advanced AI models daily, and the honest report from the workshop is that the change is hard to overstate. Every new model generation speeds up development and improves modeling accuracy. Depending on the task and the developer's skill, the multiplier ranges from 10x to something closer to 100x.
Two examples from our own work make it concrete. A complex change to a cash flow projection engine that once would have consumed months of engineering time now comes together in less than a week. A parser that reads tax forms and extracts every relevant line item, work that once took years of careful coding, now takes days.
There is a reason this particular category moves fastest. Planning engines, tax calculations, and form processing are what engineers call pure functions. Deterministic inputs go in, deterministic outputs come out, and the result can be verified against a known answer. A tax calculation either matches the IRS worksheet or it does not. AI models are remarkably good at exactly this kind of work because correctness can be checked.
Building software solutions for advisors has never been cheaper or more accurate. The real question is how advisors will benefit from this shift.
The Software Category We Believe Goes to Zero
Call it classical software: tools that store data, apply formulas, and render output. A planning engine takes your assumptions and runs the math. A proposal generator merges data into a template. A risk questionnaire scores answers against a rubric. All useful, but they all share a common trait. They are deterministic processes that use pure functions and have almost zero variable cost.
If a software company adds another advisor to its financial planning platform, the incremental cost is very close to zero. This was the beautiful economics of software for more than two decades.
Not everything in the stack fits this description, and it helps to sort the two buckets:
- Pure function tools: financial planning engines, tax projection tools, risk questionnaires, proposal generators, form fillers, fee billing calculators
- Tools with real ongoing costs: custodial and account aggregation feeds, compliance archiving and books-and-records systems, anything involving regulated data custody
We want to be clear that the second bucket is real and we are not claiming it disappears. These systems are hard to build. They're messy. They're complicated.
Data feeds and compliance infrastructure carry genuine ongoing costs and obligations. Our conviction applies to the first bucket.
For pure function tools, the economics we see are simple. When a capable team can rebuild a calculator in weeks, that calculator loses its pricing power. And history suggests this kind of software does not slowly get cheaper. It tends to drop to zero when someone bundles it, because giving it away becomes the natural way to earn the client relationship. Search, email, and mapping were all standalone paid products once. None of them got cheaper gradually. They became the free layer on which other businesses were built.
If a firm wants to keep using software the old way, meaning the advisors are storing data, building financial models, running tax scenarios, generating reports, we think that layer should cost nothing. At RK Sterling, it does.
What Advisors Pay Today
Compare that to the current bill. Across the industry, typical per-advisor pricing for classical tools looks something like this:
- Financial planning software: $100 to $300 per month
- Tax planning and analysis: $100 to $250 per month
- Risk assessment tooling: $50 to $150 per month
- Proposal and reporting tools: $100 to $300 per month
- Client portal and document vault: $50 to $150 per month
Stack five to seven of these together and $1,000 per advisor per month sits in the middle of the range, not at the top. A 10-advisor practice can spend $120,000 a year. A 50-advisor RIA can clear half a million.
In our experience, the invoice also understates the true cost. Point solutions rarely talk to each other, so your team re-enters the same household into the planning tool, the tax tool, the risk tool, and the proposal tool. Every re-entry burns staff hours and creates a chance for the numbers to disagree. It is a quiet tax on the fragmented stack, and it never shows up on a bill.
All of it pays for software that, by design, does no work.
What We Believe Replaces Seat-Based Pricing
If the classical layer becomes free, what do advisors pay for? Our answer: the work itself, because the work is the thing that still carries a real cost.
AI-powered software now performs labor. It reads a 60-page trust document and pulls out the provisions that matter. It reconciles a statement. It reviews an entire household for planning opportunities and builds the financial model. Each of those tasks consumes real compute, which means each carries a real variable cost. Unlike a form or a formula, performed work cannot be free.
So we think pricing naturally follows the work rather than the seat. A seat license charges the same whether an advisor opens the software twice a month or runs 200 households through it. That mismatch was always there. Once the software performs the labor, it becomes hard to justify. Fair pricing tracks output.
And the right yardstick for that work is not compute. It is what the work would cost a human to do. A plan drafted, a tax return analyzed, a household reviewed: each of those has always had a price, paid in paraplanner salaries, outsourced prep, or an advisor's own evenings. When software delivers the same outcome for a fraction of that cost, both sides of the arrangement come out ahead. The practice pays far less than the work used to cost, and the platform gets paid only when it actually delivers something of value.
That last point is worth pausing on, because it is the part of this model we like most. Seat pricing collects the same check whether the software helped you or sat idle. Outcome pricing means the software vendor earns nothing until work gets done, so the incentives finally point the same direction. The only way a platform grows is by doing more useful work for your practice.
And the trade keeps improving in the advisor's favor. Every model generation makes the work better and cheaper to perform, and in a competitive market those gains flow through as lower prices per outcome and higher quality output, not padded margins.
Under seat pricing, your costs were fixed and your capacity was capped by staff hours. Under outcome pricing, delegation scales with need, quality rises on its own, and the cost per unit of work trends down over time. That is capacity most practices have never had access to, on terms that get better every year.
It is fair to ask why the industry has not repriced already, and we think the answer is structural rather than a failing of anyone in it. A vendor with substantial seat-based recurring revenue cannot easily give away the classical layer without undercutting the revenue its business is built on. That constraint is real, and it is why repricing tends to arrive from newer entrants.
Migration Cost Is Falling Too
Here is the objection we hear most often, and it is a good one: the software may be free, but switching is not. Historically that was true. Migration meant a six-month project, consultant fees, and client-facing risk. Free software behind an expensive door is not free.
From what we see, that door is opening. Switching cost has four components, and three of them are falling for the same reason software cost is falling.
Data mapping. Every vendor stores households in its own format, so migration once meant a specialist hand-mapping fields between systems. Reading an arbitrary export, inferring its structure, and mapping it to a new model happens to be one of the tasks modern AI handles best. Work that used to be bespoke consulting is becoming routine and largely automated.
Data cleanup. Legacy stacks accumulate clutter: duplicate households, stale assumptions, inconsistent account registrations. Cleaning that up used to mean weeks of staff time. AI-enhanced tooling now flags and resolves most of it, with a human reviewing the exceptions rather than doing the whole job by hand.
Verification. In our conversations with advisors, the deepest concern was never the invoice. It was the plan that comes out different in the new system and the client who notices. What has changed is that a migration no longer has to be taken on trust. Rebuild the household in the new system, run both engines side by side, and compare the output line by line. Confidence becomes a checklist instead of a leap of faith.
Contract lock-in. This is the one component that is not technical at all. Multi-year terms are switching costs vendors construct, and they expire. Every renewal date is a decision point.
As migration cost falls toward zero, the last economic argument for paying for pure function software goes with it. That is why our answer to the question of when this happens is not a date on the horizon. We believe the economics support it now, for firms ready to make the move.
How RK Sterling Approaches Pricing
RK Sterling was built on the far side of this transition, which means we never had a seat-based business to protect. That gave us the freedom to price the way we believe the economics actually work.
The classical layer costs nothing. Financial planning, cash flow projections, tax scenarios, document storage, and the modeling tools a practice runs on are included at no charge. We do not think anyone should pay for pure functions, so we do not charge for them.
Firms pay only for work performed. When the platform reads and summarizes a trust document, analyzes a tax return, or reviews a household for planning opportunities, that is real labor with a real cost, and pricing follows the outcome delivered. An advisor who delegates a little pays a little. An advisor who delegates a lot buys back a lot of their week.
So how much does RK Sterling cost?
The honest answer is that it depends entirely on how much work you delegate, and the range is best shown at its two extremes.
On one end is the advisor who works the old way. They enter facts by hand, build their own planning toggles, and run canned reports. Pure function software, used the way it has always been used. Maybe they ask a research question in Sterling from time to time.
Expected cost: $0.00 to $1.00 per month.
On the other end is the power advisor. They are talking to five prospects a week and building customized plans and presentations for each to win new business. This process includes AI extracting facts automatically from the stacks of statements they receive, automatically building the financial planning model (no toggle building), and generating one-of-one presentations per prospect.
They use the Command Center to delegate 50 to 100 tasks a day and let AI do the work. They generate fully customized PowerPoint decks and PDF deliverables for each client and prospect. They are performing work that used to take a team.
Expected cost: $500 to $1,000 per month.
Compare that second number to the invoice we added up earlier. The power advisor pays about what a traditional stack costs today, except the money now buys hundreds of completed tasks a day instead of a set of calculators. And one thing seems inevitable from watching both ends of this spectrum: the AUM of the power advisor will be considerably higher. We believe power advisors will serve $250 to $500 million in assets.
They serve more households, impress more prospects, and win more business, because every deliverable that leaves their desk is higher quality work produced at a pace the old regime could not match.
What This Could Mean for Your Practice
Whatever you conclude about our thesis, a few practical steps are worth taking either way.
Inventory your stack. List every tool, its annual cost, and one honest question: does it perform work, or does it store data and run formulas? Most stacks are heavy on the second category.
Treat classical tools as renewal decisions. They are no longer permanent fixtures. The market price for what they do is falling, and each renewal is a chance to reassess.
Be careful with multi-year terms. In a repricing market, a long lock-in narrows your options. Shorter terms preserve them.
Run consumption pricing against your own workflows. A practice that delegates heavily and a practice that delegates nothing will reach different answers, and both should do the math on actual usage.
We will admit our bias plainly: we built RK Sterling because we believe this is where the industry is going. The software is getting better and cheaper at the same time, and the money RIAs are spending renting calculators can go toward real work instead.
The firms that benefit first will not necessarily be the largest ones. They will be the ones that looked at the numbers early and decided to move. We think the numbers already say zero. The rest is timing.
