Field notes › Choosing software
Per-seat vs flat pricing for workforce software
Software pricing sounds like a procurement detail until it starts changing how you run the business. Per-seat billing, where you pay per worker per month, is the default for rostering apps. It suits the vendor, and it suits some buyers. For labour hire it usually suits nobody but the vendor.
How per-seat billing behaves in practice
The pitch is fairness: pay for what you use. In practice you pay for what you have configured, which is a different thing. A labour hire pool always carries workers who are between placements, on a swing off, injured, or simply not picked this month. On per-seat billing every one of them is a paid seat unless someone remembers to deactivate them, and then remembers to reactivate them the night before they are needed again.
That deactivation admin is not a small thing. It becomes a weekly chore, it goes wrong at the worst moments, and eventually somebody deactivates a worker who was rostered on. You have added a new failure mode to your business just to manage the software bill.
The behaviours it quietly encourages
Pricing shapes behaviour more than any policy document does. When each login costs money, people start economising on logins.
- Casual workers who might get a shift someday are left out of the system, so their certificates and availability live in email instead.
- Two coordinators share one account, which wrecks the audit trail because you can no longer say who did what.
- Clients never get portal access because each client contact is another seat, so the phone keeps ringing.
Every one of those undermines the reason you bought the software. A rostering system only earns its keep when everyone who touches the roster is actually in it.
What flat pricing changes
Flat pricing per organisation, stepped by crew size, removes the meter. You put your whole pool in, including the worker who might do three shifts this year. You give every client site a login without doing sums first. You stop doing seat admin entirely. Your bill is predictable, which your accountant will appreciate, and it only moves when your crew genuinely outgrows the bracket.
This is how Mustr prices: one flat monthly price per organisation, everything included in every plan, no per-seat billing and no feature tiers. Plans start from $660 a month including GST for up to 30 users and run through to $4,180 for up to 500, with a one-time setup fee of $3,850.
Feature tiers are per-seat's quiet sibling
Watch for the second meter. Plenty of products keep the headline per-seat price low, then move the things you actually need into the expensive column: the audit trail, the client access, the compliance module. You tend to discover this after rollout, when switching costs are at their highest. Everything included in one price is not generosity, it is just an honest way to sell software. If a pricing page has three columns of ticks, read the cheapest column carefully, because that is the product you are really being quoted on.
When per-seat is fine
To be fair to the model: if you run a stable team of fifteen people who all work every week, per-seat pricing is simple and probably cheap. The model breaks when headcount is large, casual and lumpy, which is a fair description of every labour hire pool ever assembled. Before you sign anything, price the software against your busiest month, your quietest month, and the admin hours in between. That comparison usually settles the question on its own.
If you would rather see the numbers against your own crew, book a demo.