Why lenders go looking

Blend earned its position. The borrower experience is polished, the platform is broad, and it is proven at enormous scale. The reasons lenders evaluate alternatives are structural, not qualitative.

  • The pricing meters your growth. Blend prices per funded loan, quoted to your organization rather than published. Fund more loans, pay more, automatically. Volume discounts exist, but you negotiate them at renewal, after the volume has already happened.
  • It is built for the enterprise. Blend serves large banks and consumer lending lines well beyond mortgage. An independent mortgage bank with 25 to 200 loan officers is not the center of that roadmap.
  • The experience stays rented. Your brand appears on flows that run in the vendor's cloud, on the vendor's code, under the vendor's roadmap. If the relationship ends, you export data and start over.

What to compare

Whatever you choose, price the decision on these six axes, not on the demo alone.

  1. All-in cost at your current volume, then again at twice your volume
  2. What is actually included: POS only, or CRM, marketing, and the borrower portal too
  3. Where it runs and where your data lives
  4. How deep the Encompass integration goes: SSO, pipeline sync, documents
  5. How much of the borrower experience carries your brand
  6. What you keep if you leave

The alternatives

nCino Mortgage (formerly SimpleNexus)

SimpleNexus built its name on a mobile-first experience for loan officers and borrowers, and it now sells as part of the nCino platform following nCino's acquisition. It is a strong fit for institutions standardizing on nCino's broader banking system. It is per-seat SaaS in the vendor's cloud, and the mortgage product is one piece of a much larger enterprise platform.

Floify

Floify is a focused point-of-sale: application, document collection, borrower portal, and LOS sync, with published per-user pricing whose entry tiers start under $100 per user per month. The transparency is genuinely rare in this market. It is a POS layer rather than a platform, so CRM and marketing remain separate purchases.

Maxwell

Maxwell pairs a point-of-sale with a fulfillment marketplace, which makes it interesting for lenders who also want processing and underwriting capacity on demand. Per-user pricing is reported in the range of $99 to $199 per month. Like the others, it is SaaS in the vendor's cloud.

SpyGlass

SpyGlass is structured differently from everything above. It is a white-label platform covering the borrower application, borrower portal, CRM, marketing automation, and site CMS, wrapped around your Encompass instance with SSO and two-way pipeline sync. You license it once at a quoted fixed price, receive the source code, and run it in your own Azure tenant. An optional annual agreement covers support and updates. It is a new platform from a small firm, currently onboarding founding customers, and that tradeoff is exactly what the structural comparison below is for.

The math that decides it

At 100 funded loans per month, every $25 of per-loan fee is $2,500 per month, or $30,000 per year, before add-ons and pass-through costs. Per-seat models scale more gently but never stop. A one-time license costs more in year one and then stops costing. Where the lines cross depends on your volume, which is why we built a calculator instead of an argument.