Weave Pricing vs Podium and Birdeye: What You Pay

Weave's pricing page starts at $199 a month, Podium's lists plans at $399 and $599 a month plus a custom tier, and Birdeye's shows no price, only a quote form sorted by location count. The three are different tools that turn up on the same sales calls: a phone system, a lead inbox and a reviews platform, each with review requests built in.

Quick answer

• Weave's pricing page says "starting from $199 per month" and names three plans, Pro, Elite and Ultimate, each with its own price behind a "Get Pricing" button (Weave pricing, checked 2026-10-06).
• Podium's pricing page lists Core at $399 a month, Pro at $599 a month and Signature at "Custom pricing", and notes that plans "may vary based on industry, partnerships, integrations, volume, and carrier fees" (Podium pricing, checked 2026-10-06).
• Birdeye's pricing page shows no dollar figure; it asks for your location count and contact details (Birdeye pricing, checked 2026-10-06).
• Whichever one you call, bring four questions the pricing pages leave open: contract length and auto-renewal, setup or hardware cost, whether the quote is per location or per user, and what cancellation takes.

What is each tool mainly for, and who is it built for?

Treat the "built for" column as each vendor's own claim, not a verdict.

What does each page actually publish, and what does it skip?

Weave

The pricing page lists Pro, Elite ("Most Popular") and Ultimate, with monthly bulk texting allotments of 1,500, 3,000 and 15,000 messages, and says Ultimate adds "up to 15 phones, 1:1 personalized training, and premium analytics tools" (Weave pricing, checked 2026-10-06). It states no contract length, cancellation policy, setup or hardware cost, or processing rate for its payment features; ask for all four by name.

Podium

Podium's comparison table also lists fees: phone seats at $30 per user a month for 1 to 4 users and $25 for 5 or more, a $500 "network optimization fee per location" for its phones, a base 10DLC fee of $5 a month for each US location, and $5 a month for each extra number (Podium pricing, checked 2026-10-06). (10DLC is the carrier registration for business texting from an ordinary 10-digit number.) The page gives no contract length and no processing rate: Pro lists "Lower Payment Processing Fees" and Signature "Custom Processing Rates", both without a figure. It also says "Add on AI Employee to any plan" with no price, so ask what that add-on adds to the bill.

Birdeye

The page's only numbers are location bands: 1 to 3, 4 to 9, 10 to 39, 40 to 249, 250 to 999, and 1,000 or more (Birdeye pricing, checked 2026-10-06). Its line "replace point products and pay only for what you deploy at your locations" points to a modular price, which is hard to compare with a flat monthly number; ask for the total at your current location count, not a per-module list.

Can any of them show you which ads brought a paying client?

Each one records its own slice of contact: Weave its calls and texts, Podium its webchat leads, calls and messages, Birdeye its review requests, chats and replies. What their own pages say about Google:

• Weave's pricing page lists "Call Analytics" with "call tracking info", and its article on dental call tracking explains tracking numbers per source, but neither page names a link to Google Ads or GA4 (Weave pricing; Weave, checked 2026-10-06).
• Podium's help center shows how to send two webchat events, "Bubble Clicked" and "Conversation Started", to GA4 through Google Tag Manager (Podium help, checked 2026-10-06).
• Birdeye's help center says its chat widget puts events such as Open and Send into the data layer for Google Tag Manager to read (Birdeye help, checked 2026-10-06). Its "Google Partnership" page covers reviews, Business Profile listings, messaging and seller ratings in ads (Birdeye, checked 2026-10-06).

None of the pages cited here describes sending a call, a booking or a payment back to Google Ads as a conversion. GA4, Google's free website analytics, can count a chat that started; whether that person booked and paid lives in your practice records.

Across the nearly $700K in Google Ads and Meta Ads spend I managed as a media buyer, the ad platform only learned what a tracking number, a tagged link or an uploaded conversion handed back to it. CallRail, which I have worked with on an anonymized NYC medical practice's account, is a narrower tool built for that handoff: a tracking number per source, with the ad click sent back to Google Ads. If a phone or chat vendor takes calls forwarded from a number already tagged for ads, that chain can stay intact; if it issues its own numbers for every line, the source is lost the moment a call reaches it, the same handoff problem an answering service creates for an ad tracking number. Ask whether the vendor's line can sit behind a Google forwarding number or replaces one.

The same gap applies to online booking. Calendly, a scheduler I have worked with, records five utm_ tags (the campaign labels added to a link) from the scheduling link on the booked event, so the campaign name survives the booking step; its help names no Google click id (Calendly, checked 2026-10-06). Ask Weave, Podium or Birdeye the same question about their scheduling features: does a tag on the link that brought someone in reach the confirmed appointment, or does the widget drop it?

What do the review rules mean once one of these is sending requests?

All three tools can send review requests; none of them can override the platforms the reviews land on. Google's Maps policy says merchants may not "selectively solicit positive reviews from customers", may not pressure customers to review "while on the premises" or ask for specific content, and removes content posted because of a business's incentive (Google, checked 2026-10-06). That rules out sending requests only to the patients you expect to be happy, a practice sometimes called review gating, as well as any discount tied to leaving a review.

In the US, the FTC's rule on consumer reviews, in effect since October 21, 2024 (Federal Register, checked 2026-10-06), bars a business from offering an incentive conditioned on a review's sentiment and from using unfounded legal threats, physical threats, intimidation or public false accusations to stop a review or get one removed (16 CFR Part 465, checked 2026-10-06). Ask each vendor how its review-request flow decides who gets asked, and whether any filter that skips unhappy patients can be switched off.

If the request goes out as a text or an email, a Canadian practice has one more rule: Canada's anti-spam law (CASL) bars sending a commercial electronic message, one with a purpose of encouraging participation in a commercial activity, without the recipient's express or implied consent (Justice Laws, checked 2026-10-06). Whether a review request counts depends on what it says and links to, so ask the vendor how it records consent for a Canadian practice before turning the feature on.

What would a year of one of these cost against what you pay now?

Illustrative: every number below is made up for an imaginary two-location med spa, none comes from a client, and none is a vendor quote.

The formula: the new tool's monthly price times 12, minus your current tools' monthly total times 12. Here $4,080 minus $2,460 is $1,620 more a year, which only pencils out if the new tool also saves staff time spent switching between two systems, or the current phones are due for replacement anyway. Run it with your own lines and the demo's real quote in place of the $340.

What should you ask on the demo, whichever one you pick?

• What is the first contract term, does it renew itself, and what does cancellation take? None of the three pricing pages states a term.
• Is the price per location, per user, or a flat practice rate, quoted against your actual count?
• Is there a setup or hardware fee? Podium's page names a $500 per-location fee for its phones; Weave's and Birdeye's name none. And what does any payment feature charge per transaction? None of the three pages names a processing rate.
• What happens to your phone numbers, texting history and review requests if you leave?
• Can the tool pass a tag or a click id through to a booking or a form? None of the three pricing pages addresses it, and it decides whether your ad account ever learns what these calls and texts were worth.

If reviews are your main reason to call, pulling competitors' low-star reviews into a labeled sheet is a free way to learn what to ask for in your own request flow before you pay to automate it.