The seat minimum is a pricing decision, and you are paying for it
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 tools in this category will not sell you exactly the number of seats you have.
monday.com sells in seat buckets, with a floor of three
monday.com's Pro plan lists at $19 per editor per month, billed annually (US list price, as published on its pricing page in July 2026). But the smallest purchase is 3 seats, and above that seats are sold in buckets — 3, 5, 10 and up — so between two buckets you pay for the larger one.
So if your team is six people, you do not buy six seats. You buy ten.
| Editors you have | Seats monday bills | Monthly, billed annually | Effective rate per real editor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 5 | $95 | $23.75 |
| 6 | 10 | $190 | $31.67 |
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.
Quickbase will not sell you fewer than twenty
Quickbase's Team plan lists at $35 per user per month, billed annually, with a floor of 20 users (US list price, July 2026). 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 was on their pricing page when we read it in July 2026. 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.
Sources: monday.com and Quickbase prices and seat rules as published on monday.com/pricing and quickbase.com/plans-and-pricing in July 2026 — US list prices in US dollars, billed annually. The arithmetic in the tables is ours. Appdor's own prices are in euros, on its pricing page.