Per-seat pricing is broken for agencies. Here is the maths.

Per-seat pricing assumes a stable roster of full-time employees who all use the tool equally. Agencies are the opposite of that, and the pricing model punishes them for it.

Three ways per-seat pricing fails agency economics

Contractors. A freelance motion designer on a two-week engagement needs access for two weeks. You pay for a month, often annually, because downgrading mid-term is either impossible or non-refundable. Across a year with fifteen contractor engagements, that is fifteen months of seats for maybe four months of work.

Clients. Every tool that counts clients as seats forces a choice: pay to let clients see the work, or send status emails instead. Most agencies choose emails, then spend four hours a week writing them. At a $120 blended rate that is $25,000 a year of unbilled admin to avoid a $1,500 seat bill.

Occasional users. The finance person needs the tool twice a month to invoice. The founder needs it weekly. They cost the same as the designer living in it eight hours a day.

The utilisation maths

Take a 20-person agency at $18/user/month: $4,320/year. Now weight by actual usage — say six heavy users, six regular, four occasional, four near-zero. Cost per hour of use for the heavy users might be $0.02; for the near-zero users it is effectively infinite. You are subsidising access you do not use, and the vendor's revenue model depends on you doing exactly that.

Why flat pricing changes the decision

A flat plan — one price for up to N people — inverts the incentive. Adding the finance person, the new contractor and the client's project sponsor costs nothing, so you add them. Everyone works in one place, which is the entire point of the tool. The vendor's revenue becomes predictable and yours becomes a fixed cost you can put in an overhead line instead of re-forecasting every hire.

Our Agency plan is $39/month for up to 25 people, all features included. At 25 people that is $1.56 per person per month. The reason we can do it: unlike a seat-based vendor, we are not pricing against the value of the seat, we are pricing against the cost of serving your workspace, which barely moves whether you have 8 users or 25.

The counter-argument, fairly stated

Flat pricing is worse for very small teams. Three people are better off on a $4/seat plan at $12/month than on a $39 flat plan. That is why both exist — and why we do not require a seat minimum that pushes a three-person studio into paying for six.

Questions to ask any vendor

• Do guests and clients count as billable seats? Ask for it in writing.
• Can I remove a seat mid-term and stop paying for it?
• Is there a seat minimum or block size?
• What happens to my price at renewal?
• Which features are metered per month rather than unlimited?

The answers to those five questions predict your real bill far better than the number on the pricing page.

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