> Short answer: Per-seat pricing charges for every person you add; flat
per-team pricing charges one price for the whole team up to a member limit.
Flat pricing wins when your team is near the top of a tier and loses right after
you cross into a new one. The break-even against monday.com's €9/seat Basic plan
is about nine people; against its €12/seat Standard plan, about seven. The rest
of this article shows the working.
The problem per-seat pricing creates
The invoice is not the interesting part. The interesting part is the decision it forces.
Under per-seat pricing, every person you add to the tool costs the same as every other person — the operations lead who lives in it, and the finance manager who needs to look at one project once a fortnight. Since the price is identical and the usage is not, someone eventually does the sensible-looking thing and stops buying seats for the occasional users.
That decision is where the damage happens. The finance manager now asks for status by email. The freelancer gets briefed in WhatsApp. The client is sent a PDF export. Within a quarter, a meaningful share of project communication has moved back out of the tool — and the tool's core promise, that the plan is in one place, is quietly false.
Teams usually diagnose this as an adoption problem. It is a pricing-structure problem with an adoption-shaped symptom.
What the market actually charges
Verified from vendor pricing pages on 7 September 2026. Prices are shown in the currency each vendor quotes; no conversion has been applied, because a made-up exchange rate would produce false precision.
| Vendor | Model | Free tier | Entry paid | Next tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Asana | Per user | Up to 2 users | $10.99/user/mo annual ($13.49 monthly) | $24.99/user/mo annual |
| ClickUp | Per user | Free Forever, 60MB storage | $7/user/mo annual ($10 monthly) | $12/user/mo annual ($19 monthly) |
| monday.com | Per seat | Up to 2 seats | €9/seat/mo | €12/seat/mo, then €19 |
| Poitim | Per team | €0, up to 2 members | €49/mo flat, up to 5 | €79/mo up to 15, €149/mo up to 40 |
The break-even math
This is the part most pricing pages avoid. Poitim's flat tiers are €49 (up to 5 people), €79 (up to 15) and €149 (up to 40). Against monday.com's per-seat plans in the same currency:
Against monday.com Basic (€9/seat/month)
| Team size | monday.com | Poitim | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | €45 | €49 (Starter) | monday.com |
| 9 | €81 | €79 (Pro) | roughly even |
| 15 | €135 | €79 (Pro) | Poitim, by €56 |
| 25 | €225 | €149 (Business) | Poitim, by €76 |
| 40 | €360 | €149 (Business) | Poitim, by €211 |
| Team size | monday.com | Poitim | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | €60 | €49 (Starter) | Poitim |
| 15 | €180 | €79 (Pro) | Poitim, by €101 |
| 40 | €480 | €149 (Business) | Poitim, by €331 |
Where flat pricing loses, plainly
Any pricing page that only shows the favourable half of a comparison is selling, not informing. Three cases where per-seat genuinely wins:
- You are just over a tier boundary. A six-person team pays €79 on Poitim's Pro
- Your team is small and uniform. Three people who all use the tool equally get
- You are above the top tier. Poitim's largest tier stops at 40 members. Past
The honest summary: flat pricing is a bet that your team will use the headroom. If you are at the bottom of a tier and not growing, it is the wrong bet.
The cost that never appears on either invoice
Both models have a cost that no pricing page lists, and it is usually larger than the difference between them.
Under per-seat, it is the excluded people. Every person left off the tool reconstructs their view of the project somewhere else — a spreadsheet, an email thread, a chat channel. That duplicated state is where deadlines get missed, because two versions of the plan exist and only one is maintained.
Under flat pricing, it is the unused headroom. A team of six on a fifteen-person tier is paying for nine places. That is real money, and the vendor is not going to mention it.
Which cost is larger depends entirely on the shape of your team, which is why the correct question is not "which model is cheaper" but "which cost can I actually afford". A five-person startup can afford unused headroom more easily than an eighteen-person agency can afford three people working from a stale spreadsheet.
The sticker price is not the price
Comparing headline per-seat rates understates the gap, because the number on the pricing page is increasingly not the number on the invoice. Three things to check before you budget, all verified on vendor pricing pages on 7 September 2026.
AI is often a separate subscription. ClickUp prices its AI as an additional per-user product on top of the work-management plan: Brain AI at $9/user/month monthly ($7.20 annual), and Everything AI at $28/user/month ($22.40 annual). A ten-person team on ClickUp's Business plan at $12/user annual pays $120 a month; add Brain AI and it is $192. The AI line item can be more than half the base cost.
The tier you need is rarely the entry tier. Vendors place the features teams actually reach for — timeline views, dependencies, advanced automation, proofing, portfolio roll-ups — above the entry plan. The honest comparison is not Asana Starter at $10.99 against everything else; it is the tier that has the feature you cannot work without. On Asana that is often Advanced at $24.99/user/month, which more than doubles the per-person cost.
Annual billing is the advertised price. Nearly every rate quoted in this article is the annual-commitment number. Monthly billing is materially higher — Asana Starter goes from $10.99 to $13.49, ClickUp Business from $12 to $19, roughly a 58% increase in that last case. If you want the flexibility to leave, you pay for it.
Worth adding: monday.com sells separate product lines rather than one price list — Work Management from €9/seat, CRM from €12, Dev from €9, and Service from €31/seat on its Standard plan. A team using two of them is running two subscriptions.
None of this is dishonest pricing; it is normal SaaS packaging. But it means a per-seat comparison done from headline rates alone will understate the real bill, usually by a lot.
How to work out your own answer in five minutes
- Count the people who need to see the work, not the people who work in it.
- Multiply it by the per-seat price of the plan you would actually buy — the tier
- Compare against the flat tier that covers that headcount.
- Model the headcount you expect in twelve months, not today's. This is the step
- Then ask the question the arithmetic cannot answer: in the last three months,
Where Poitim fits — and where it doesn't
Poitim charges per team: €0, €49, €79 and €149 per month, with member caps of 2, 5, 15 and 40. Adding someone inside your cap costs nothing and needs no approval, which is the entire behavioural argument for the model.
The limits, stated plainly. The caps are real. Poitim does not sell an uncapped plan, so if a headcount ceiling is a dealbreaker, this is not the product. Above 40 people there is currently no tier at all. And as the table above shows, a small team sitting just above a boundary will pay more than it would on a per-seat plan; if that is you, the honest advice is to wait until you grow into it.
Poitim is made by poi369 OÜ in Tallinn, Estonia, with application data on our own servers in France — relevant if EU jurisdiction is part of your decision, irrelevant if it isn't.
Frequently asked questions
What does per-seat pricing mean? You pay a fixed price for each person with access, every month. Ten people on a $10.99/user plan costs $109.90 monthly. The bill grows with headcount, so each new person is a separate purchasing decision.
Is flat-rate project management software always cheaper? No. It is cheaper when your team is near the top of a pricing tier and more expensive just after you cross into a new one. Against monday.com's €9/seat Basic plan, the crossover is around nine people; below that, per-seat costs less.
What does a 10-person team actually pay for Asana? On Asana's Starter plan at $10.99 per user per month billed annually, ten people is $109.90 per month, or $134.90 on monthly billing. The Advanced plan at $24.99 per user brings the same team to $249.90 per month annually billed. Verified from Asana's pricing page on 7 September 2026; check it before you budget.
Do free plans solve this? Rarely, at team scale. Asana's free tier covers up to 2 users and monday.com's free plan up to 2 seats, which is below the size at which the seat decision starts to hurt. ClickUp's free tier is more generous on users but caps storage at 60MB.
Why do vendors prefer per-seat pricing? Revenue grows automatically with a customer's headcount, without renegotiation. It is a good model for the vendor and a reasonable one for buyers whose usage really is uniform across the team. It becomes a poor fit when usage is uneven, which is most teams.
Does a member cap have the same problem as a seat limit? Partly, but the decision moves. With per-seat pricing you decide about each person individually and continuously. With a cap you make one decision when you approach the ceiling. The day-to-day friction of adding an occasional user disappears; the ceiling itself does not.