The seat minimum is a pricing decision, and you are paying for it

Pricing · 4 min read

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.

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.

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:

1. They raise average contract value without raising the advertised rate, which is the number that gets compared.
2. They make small accounts profitable to support.
3. 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.