PACS software pricing in India (2026): what a PACS actually costs

The four ways PACS is priced in India

Every PACS quote you receive will be one of these four structures, or a hybrid of two. Knowing which one you are looking at is the first step to comparing them.

• Per-study cloud fee. You pay a rupee amount per report or per patient, sometimes with a monthly minimum, and storage beyond a short window is billed separately. Gratirad prices this way, from Rs 7 per X-ray and Rs 20 per CT or MRI report with 10 days of storage included. Cost tracks volume exactly; the storage line is the one to watch.
• Monthly or annual cloud subscription. A flat fee sized by number of centres, radiologists and included cases, with an overage rate above the plan. Nandico's ladder runs Rs 900 to Rs 18,000 a month, and CrelioHealth's USD 50 monthly minimum plus per-study storage sits between this model and the first. Predictable, and cheap at the bottom; check what happens to the bill when you outgrow a tier.
• On-premise licence plus AMC. A one-time licence and hardware purchase, then an annual maintenance contract expressed as a percentage of the licence value, escalating yearly. This is how Medsynapse, RADSpa, SoftLink, GE, Philips and Fujifilm are typically bought in India, and none of them publishes the licence or the percentage. Capital-heavy up front; the marginal study is nearly free thereafter.
• Open source plus support. Orthanc's licence costs nothing. You pay for the server, the storage, a viewer, backups, hardening, integration and support hours, and you carry the operational risk. Orthanc Team sells pre-paid support hours and does not publish the rate.

If you are still deciding which of the vendors below belongs on your shortlist, start with the comparison of PACS software sold in India; for what a PACS is and how the deployment models differ globally, see the PACS for hospitals buyer's guide.

What moves the price

• Studies per month. The primary driver in every model. Subscription tiers are sized by included cases (Nandico: 100 to 3,000 a month), per-study plans bill each report, and on-premise quotes are sized on annual volume. Overage rates matter as much as the plan price.
• Storage and retention years. The line that surprises buyers. Published cloud plans include days or a month of storage; keeping five years of priors is billed on top, per case and per period (Nandico Rs 1 to Rs 5 a case; Gratirad Rs 1 per study per six months). CT and MRI studies are larger, which is why CrelioHealth prices them at two to four times an X-ray.
• Modalities and sites. More scanners mean more DICOM nodes to configure and more concurrent load; more sites mean higher subscription tiers (Nandico prices by centre count) and, on-premise, more hardware or a central archive with edge caches.
• Whether a RIS is included. Medsynapse, RADSpa and CrelioHealth bundle a RIS; Fujifilm and Philips sell it as a module; GE, Nandico and Gratirad expect you to have one. A PACS-only price and a RIS-PACS price are different products.
• AI. Built-in models, an orchestrator that routes to third-party algorithms, or nothing. Where AI is a separate licence or a per-study surcharge, it is a second budget line; where it is inside the system, ask how it is priced within the quote.
• Migration. The size of the legacy archive, the export terms of the vendor you are leaving, and the interfaces to rebuild. No vendor publishes a migration fee; every quote for a replacement PACS should carry one explicitly, even if it says zero.
• SLA and support. Uptime guarantees (Philips publishes 99.99% on its managed service), support hours, response times and whether a named engineer exists in your city. Enterprise-grade SLAs are priced in, and cheaper plans usually do not have one.

Five-year total cost: a worked example

The only fair comparison across the four models is total cost over the life of the contract. Below is the arithmetic for one illustrative centre, using published figures only. Assumptions, stated plainly: 3,000 studies a month (2,000 X-ray, 600 CT, 400 MRI), which is 36,000 a year and 1,80,000 over five years; every study retained for the five-year window; prices as published on 22 September 2026, ex-GST; no growth in volume. Your numbers will differ, and the point is the method, not the total.

Three lessons fall out of the arithmetic. First, storage can equal or exceed the software: on Nandico's plan the five-year storage line ranges from a fifth of the subscription to matching it, depending on where in the Rs 1 to Rs 5 band your retention lands. Second, minimums decide which tier is right: Gratirad's Enterprise plan looks cheapest per report at Rs 3 and Rs 6, but at this volume it generates Rs 12,000 of usage against a Rs 50,000 monthly floor plus a Rs 1 lakh setup fee, which makes it the most expensive option for this centre and the right one only at far higher volumes. Third, usage-priced plans need one question answered before they can be modelled at all: does the per-study charge recur for as long as the study is stored?

Run the same table on every quote you receive, including the ones that arrive as a licence and an AMC percentage. If a vendor cannot fill in its column for your volume and retention, that is information too.

Hidden costs to check

The headline price is not the contract. Six places where PACS quotes quietly grow:

• Migration fees, charged by the new vendor to ingest your archive, and sometimes by the old vendor to export it per study. Get both in writing before signing either contract.
• Storage overage: retention beyond the included window (10 days to a month on the published cloud plans), studies above the plan's case count, and larger-than-average CT and MRI sizes on plans priced by megabyte.
• Viewer and workstation licences: per-seat or per-concurrent-user charges for diagnostic viewers, 3D and MPR modules, and mobile access. Cloud plans that say "unlimited radiologists" are the exception, not the norm.
• Integration charges: HL7 interfaces to the HIS, RIS or LIS, modality worklist configuration, and each new scanner added later. Ask for a per-interface rate card.
• AMC escalation: the annual percentage rises each year on most on-premise contracts. A cap, or a fixed schedule for the full term, belongs in the agreement.
• Exit and data-export fees: the cost of getting your own studies back in DICOM format, in bulk, when you leave. Negotiate this on the way in; the vendor you are leaving controls the timeline otherwise.

How 5C prices SuperPACS

Honestly: 5C Network does not publish a price for SuperPACS, and this page will not invent one. Commercial terms are quoted against your volumes, per facility, and there is no list price, no published tier and no published discount. The SuperPACS product page lists item by item what 5C publishes today and what to ask us.

The reason the quote does not map onto the four models above is that the cost base is different in kind. SuperPACS is built on the production infrastructure that already reads 15,000+ studies a day for 2,000+ facilities, so the archive, the Bionic AI engine, the Prodigi RIS and a 400+ radiologist reporting network are one system. A hospital comparing it with a conventional PACS should compare it against the PACS quote plus the AI licence plus the reporting contract, because those are the three lines it replaces.

What to bring when you ask: your monthly modality mix and study volumes, the number of sites, your retention policy, the RIS and HIS interfaces you run today, any data-residency or local-cache requirement, and whether a PACS decision is in your next planning cycle or the archive you have is fine and only the reporting is slow.

If it is the latter, you do not need a PACS quote at all. 5C's reporting is priced pay-per-scan, with no minimum volume, no licence fees and no onboarding cost; rates are quoted against your actual monthly modality mix and SLA needs, the first 10 cases are free, and 5C connects to any existing DICOM PACS in about 72 hours. The teleradiology pricing guide covers that model in full, or contact us with your configuration.

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