Per-seat pricing means your software bill grows in exact proportion to your headcount: add a person, add a fixed monthly charge, no matter how much or how little time tracking or invoicing that person actually does. Run that arithmetic from a 3-person studio to a 25-person one and per-seat charges become one of the largest recurring line items in the budget, growing every time hiring goes well. A flat price does not do this. It stays where it started, whether the roster has 3 people on it or 25.
This has become a live question for a specific reason. Harvest's 2026 pricing adds a per-seat fee on top of metered charges for invoices, projects, clients and tasks, and Keito prices its plans per user as well. Neither company is doing anything unusual by industry standards. Per-seat pricing is the default across most of software. The point of this post is not that per-seat pricing is a scam. It is that per-seat pricing makes your software bill a function of your hiring plan, and most agency owners never actually run that number until the invoice arrives.
What per-seat pricing actually charges you for
A seat, in this context, is an account. It is not a measure of work done. A junior designer who logs four billable hours a week and a project lead who logs forty both cost the same seat fee, because the software is billing for the existence of the login, not for what happens inside it. That is a defensible way to price software. It is also a way of pricing that has nothing to do with the value the account owner gets from any individual person on the roster.
The practical effect shows up at hiring time. A studio owner deciding whether to bring on a fifth person is already weighing salary, equipment, onboarding time, and whatever else goes into that decision. Per-seat software pricing adds one more variable to that same decision, quietly, because the person doing the hiring math rarely thinks of the time-tracking tool as part of the cost of a hire. It is. It just does not show up until the next invoice.
The arithmetic, from 3 people to 25
Keito lists $19 and $49 per-user monthly tiers. Multiply either one across a hiring run from 3 to 25 people and the shape of the problem becomes obvious.
| Team size | Keito at $19/user | Keito at $49/user | FlatHours Team plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 people | $57 | $147 | $29 |
| 10 people | $190 | $490 | $29 |
| 20 people | $380 | $980 | $29 |
| 25 people | $475 | $1,225 | $29 |
Those figures are simple multiplication of the published per-user rates against headcount, nothing more. They are also not hypothetical: Keito's own pricing page notes that a team of 20 on its middle tier runs to around $340 a month before add-ons, and that an enterprise quote starts around $199 a month for larger teams. Those are numbers customers are actually being quoted, not a worst case built to make a point.
The FlatHours Team plan is $29 a month flat, for unlimited people, whether the roster has 3 names on it or 25. Nothing about that changes when the tenth person joins, or the twentieth. We also never charge for invoices sent, projects created, clients added, or tasks used, so the bill does not move when the work does either, only when you choose a different plan.
Per-seat pricing does not know the difference between a hire and an AI agent
The seat question has gotten more complicated in the last year, because a growing share of billable work is now done by AI agents rather than people. An agent that drafts client emails, reconciles time entries, or does first-pass invoice review is doing work that used to require a human seat. In most accounts, check whether that agent counts as a seat too, because software that bills per user tends to treat any authenticated account the same way, human or not. If it does, hiring an agent triggers the same per-seat charge as hiring a person, even though the agent is not being paid a salary and does not take holidays.
We priced this problem directly rather than leave it to the reader to discover at renewal time. FlatHours' approach to billing for AI agent work treats agent time as something to price and invoice accurately, using a token-cost catalog refreshed daily across thousands of models and providers, rather than something that quietly adds another seat fee to the account. Whether an agent should be billed to a client at all, and how, is a separate conversation. Whether it should cost you a monthly seat fee just to exist in your workspace is the one this post is about.
The honest case for per-seat pricing
Per-seat pricing is not irrational, and a studio that never plans to grow past one or two people should say so out loud before switching anything. If a team of two would pay $38 a month on a $19-per-seat plan, and the alternative is an unlimited flat tier priced at $29 for a team of any size, the per-seat plan is not obviously worse for that team, and it might be cheaper depending on which tier they're actually on. Flat pricing is a bet that the value of never recalculating the bill is worth more than the marginal savings a very small, permanently small team might get from paying strictly per head.
That is exactly why FlatHours has three tiers rather than one. The Free plan costs nothing for one person. The Solo plan is $5 a month for one person with Stripe payments and recurring invoices. The jump to unlimited people at $29 a month is the one that matters for this argument, and it is the one worth running the arithmetic on before assuming a per-seat competitor is cheaper. For a studio that expects to stay at one person indefinitely, that arithmetic can favour per-seat. For anyone who expects to hire again, it stops favouring per-seat somewhere around the third or fourth person, and keeps getting worse for per-seat after that.
What changes when the bill stops moving
The real argument here is not about which number is smaller in any given month. It is about what a flat price removes from a hiring decision. With per-seat billing, every new hire comes with a software cost attached that has to be checked, budgeted, and sometimes renegotiated with the vendor. With a flat price, the software cost was already decided the day the plan was chosen, and it does not need revisiting because someone joined the team. That is a small thing in any single month. Across a hiring run from 3 people to 25, it stops being small.
None of this requires believing per-seat pricing is a trick. It requires doing the multiplication once, against your own actual hiring plan, rather than the plan you had when you signed up. If your team is going to look meaningfully different in a year than it does today, that multiplication is worth doing before the next renewal, not after it.