EDI integration costs $50-$3,000+ a month depending on trading partners, volume, and ERP depth. Here's how pricing works and how to plan a build in 2026.
Most companies hear about EDI the day a large customer sends a vendor packet that says every order, invoice, and ship notice must flow through EDI. You can be live with a basic one-partner setup for roughly $50-$300 a month, while a managed mid-market service runs $300-$1,500 a month, and a custom ERP-integrated build starts near $50,000 in one-time setup. The number that matters for you depends on trading partner count, document volume, and how deep the connection goes into your ERP.
The ranges below come from current provider pricing and integrator estimates. Use them to sanity-check any quote you receive.
| Setup | Typical cost (2026) |
|---|---|
| Basic cloud EDI, single trading partner | $50-$300/month |
| Managed EDI service, mid-market | $300-$1,500/month |
| EDI software platform (Cleo, Orderful-class) | $300-$3,000/month |
| Legacy VAN with per-document fees | $1,000-$5,000/month |
| On-premise EDI license, hardware, and install | $8,000-$40,000 one-time |
| Custom ERP-integrated build, enterprise | $50,000-$100,000+ setup |
These are planning ranges, not quotes. Two companies with the same number of partners can pay three times different prices because of how they integrate. A supplier that drops a CSV onto a VAN pays far less than one that maps EDI directly into NetSuite or SAP order tables.
EDI is Electronic Data Interchange: machine-readable business documents exchanged between two companies' systems instead of email or PDF. North America mostly uses ANSI X12. Europe and much of the rest of the world use EDIFACT. X12 documents are numbered: an 850 is a purchase order, 855 a PO acknowledgment, 856 an advance ship notice, 810 an invoice, and 997 a functional acknowledgment that confirms receipt.
The files move over AS2, SFTP, or a value-added network (VAN). AS2 is what most retailers require.
Retail, manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare never dropped EDI. Walmart, Target, Home Depot, automotive tier-one programs, and most grocers mandate it. EDI is not going anywhere. It is the plumbing that high-volume, compliance-heavy trade still runs on, and it coexists with APIs rather than being replaced by them.
Five things drive the price.
Trading partners. Every partner has its own mapping and testing cycle. Providers such as Orderful charge per partner, around $189 a month per partner, so partner count is the single biggest lever.
Document volume and types. A basic plan covers a few documents. Adding 940/945 warehouse orders, 846 inventory feeds, and 820 remittance documents on top of 850/810/856 means more mapping and more testing.
Integration depth. A flat-file or CSV handoff is cheap. A live connection into your ERP's order and invoice tables is real engineering and costs more.
VAN and transaction fees. Legacy networks charge per kilocharacter or per document, commonly $0.10-$1.25 a document, which adds up quietly as volume grows.
Compliance and testing. Each retailer publishes an implementation guide and runs a certification test. Mapping updates when a partner changes a spec are often billable.
For most small and mid-sized companies a managed service is the right call. SPS Commerce, TrueCommerce, and Cleo run managed EDI for $300-$1,500 a month and handle mapping and testing for you. The trade-off is you pay every month and sit among thousands of other customers.
Building your own makes sense when EDI is core to your operation: high volume, many partners, or order data that has to stay in systems you control. Companies do this on middleware such as Boomi, MuleSoft, or IBM Sterling B2B Integrator, or with a custom-built service. Expect several weeks to a few months of work and a six-figure budget at the enterprise end.
A VAN sits in the middle. You connect to the network once and it routes documents to any partner on it. Convenient, but per-document fees accumulate.
EDI is only as useful as the systems behind it. A purchase order that lands in a CSV folder still needs a person to act on it. The whole point of integration is that an 850 creates a sales order, an 810 posts an invoice, and an 856 triggers a shipment, all without re-keying.
That means mapping EDI segments to your order, inventory, and accounting tables, then handling the errors: a rejected 997, a missing item code, a partner that changed its spec mid-quarter. We treat EDI as an extension of the order management and supply chain work rather than a one-off file transfer. GlobeSoft has built order management and supply chain systems for retail and cross-border e-commerce clients, and EDI is a standard part of those builds. If you are weighing this against other integration work, our ERP integration guide covers the planning side.
Basic cloud EDI for one partner starts around $50-$300 a month. Managed EDI runs $300-$1,500 a month for mid-market companies, and a custom ERP-integrated build starts near $50,000 in setup costs at the enterprise level.
EDI exchanges standardized documents (X12, EDIFACT) in batches over AS2 or a VAN. APIs exchange JSON or XML in near real time. Most companies run both: EDI for high-volume order and invoice traffic, APIs for real-time inventory and tracking.
A single trading partner through a managed service can be live in two to four weeks. A full multi-partner, ERP-integrated build usually takes two to six months including mapping and certification testing.
If a customer mandates it, yes. With only one or two partners you rarely need a full custom build. A managed service or VAN gets you compliant faster and cheaper, and you can revisit a build later if volume grows.
The core retail set is 850 (purchase order), 855 (acknowledgment), 856 (advance ship notice), and 810 (invoice), plus 997 (functional acknowledgment). Wholesale and warehouse programs often add 940/945 and 846.
If a customer is asking for EDI, start with their implementation guide. It lists every document and field they require, and that guide, not a generic quote, defines your scope. Then choose managed service or custom build based on partner count and volume, and push the mapping into your ERP instead of a folder.
Planning an EDI or ERP integration project? GlobeSoft is a software development company based in Shenzhen, China, with engineers across Java and Spring Boot who have delivered order management, supply chain, and financial systems for clients in the US, Singapore, and Brazil. Talk to us about your project.
GlobeSoft builds custom software, AI applications, SaaS, FinTech and enterprise systems for clients worldwide. Message us on WhatsApp for the fastest answer, or email us — we typically reply within 24 hours.
Keep reading
Adding payments looks small in the project plan and eats two weeks if you get it wrong. The steps, the methods, and the mistakes that cost teams the most.
7 min readERP integration services cost $5,000 to $150,000 depending on scope. Here's what they cover, the three integration approaches, and how to plan one.
7 min readHow Pix payment integration works for businesses selling in Brazil: gateway vs direct routes, fees of 0.22% to 0.99%, Pix Cobranca and Automatico, and a build checklist.
7 min readWhat mobile money integration costs, the M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, Flutterwave and Paystack routes, timelines, and the licensing and reconciliation that matter.
7 min readWhat ERP data migration actually costs, the six steps that keep a go-live on schedule, and why dirty source data is the real risk in 2026.
13 min readA real estate CRM is more than a contact list. Here are the modules, MLS and IDX integrations, and commission handling that decide the build, and what it costs.
