Here is a thing that is easy to miss when you compare pricing pages: the number
on the page is the rate, not the bill.
Two of the biggest tools in this category will not sell you exactly the number
of seats you have.
The product tour, silent by design. Full-resolution video.
monday.com sells in blocks of five, with a floor of three
The Pro plan is $19 per editor per month. But the smallest purchase is
3 seats, and above that it is sold in blocks of 5.
So if your team is six people, you do not buy six seats. You buy ten.
| Editors you have | Seats monday bills | Monthly | Effective rate per real editor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5 | $95 | $95.00 |
| 6 | 10 | $190 | $31.67 |
| 11 | 15 | $285 | $25.91 |
| 16 | 20 | $380 | $23.75 |
Every one of those rows is a real invoice, and every figure in the table came
out of the function our own pricing page bills against rather than out of my
head. At six editors you pay for ten at $19 each, so the rate per person
you actually have is $19 on the pricing page and $31.67 in practice —
67% higher.
Note the first row. The floor is 3 seats but the block size is
5, so a single editor is rounded up to 5 rather than
to the floor. The two rules compound; they do not overlap.
Quickbase will not sell you fewer than twenty
The Team plan is $35 per user per month with a floor of
20 users. That is the entry price of the product, and it is the
entry price whether you are twenty people or three.
For a team of five evaluating it, the pricing page says $35 and the
invoice says $700 a month — 20 seats at $35,
four times the people you have. That is not a trick; it is on their page. But it
is the number that decides whether you can pilot the thing, and it is not the
number anyone quotes in a meeting.
Why vendors do this
Not out of malice. Seat floors and buckets do three things for a vendor:
- They raise average contract value without raising the advertised rate, which is the number that gets compared.
- They make small accounts profitable to support.
- They create a step function, so growth produces revenue in jumps rather than smoothly.
The third is the one to watch, because it means your bill moves when you hire
your eleventh editor and does not move when you hire your twelfth.
What Appdor does
No minimum, and no buckets. You are billed for the editors you have, viewers are
free and unlimited, and the plan does not decide which of the product you may
use — all 48 page elements, 25 chart types and
24 dashboard widgets are in every tier.
⚠️ That is a pricing commitment, not a claim of being cheapest. For a large team
on an annual deal, a competitor's negotiated rate may well beat our list price.
What we are saying is narrower and checkable: you will not be invoiced for
seats you do not have.
If you want the comparison for your own headcount rather than a table of
somebody else's, the migration calculator on the pricing page does the
arithmetic — including the floors and the buckets, because a saving computed
against the advertised rate rather than the real invoice would be the same
sleight of hand this post is about.
The wider point
Seat rules are the clearest example of something true across this whole
category: the pricing page is a marketing surface and the invoice is the
product. When you evaluate any of these tools, price the invoice for the team
you actually have, at the size you expect to be in a year, with the features you
will actually need — and check which of those features is a tier.
Originally published at appdor.com. I build Appdor, so weigh accordingly.
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