When you look at a CRM's headline price, you are usually looking at the cost for one person. The real number is that figure times your team, every month, forever. Per-seat pricing is the default across the big platforms, and for a small business it has two costs: the obvious one on the invoice, and a quieter one that undermines the whole point of having a CRM.
How per-seat adds up
The model is simple: you pay for each user. In the UK, HubSpot runs from £18 per seat per month at Starter to £85 per seat at Professional. So:
- A team of five on Professional is around £425 a month in seats.
- A team of ten is around £850 a month.
And seats are just the start. Professional and Enterprise tiers add mandatory onboarding fees (£1,200 to £6,090 per hub), there is a roughly 5% annual renewal uplift, and costs can climb again as your contact database grows. The headline per-seat price is rarely the real per-month price. (HubSpot figures are UK list prices excluding VAT, correct at the time of writing.)
The quieter cost: you start rationing access
This is the part that does the real damage. When every login has a price, you start asking who really needs one. The warehouse team, the part-timer on the trade counter, the person who only needs to check an order now and then: they do not get a seat, because each seat costs money.
But a CRM only works when it is the single place everything lives. The moment some of your people are locked out, they go back to spreadsheets, notepads and shouting across the office, and your one source of truth has holes in it. Per-seat pricing nudges you, month after month, towards exactly the fragmented setup the CRM was supposed to replace.
The flat-rate alternative
Flat-rate pricing charges one price no matter how many people use the system. Everyone gets access: the office, the warehouse, the counter, the part-timers, at no extra cost. That is the model behind Jeanus, where every plan includes unlimited users, from £49 a month.
The saving against per-seat can be large. A flat plan covering a team of ten can cost a small fraction of £850 a month, and there is no onboarding bill or renewal uplift waiting in the wings. Just as importantly, because access is free, you can actually get your whole team on the system, which is the only way a CRM does its job. See the side-by-side at Jeanus vs HubSpot.
When per-seat is fine
To be fair about it: per-seat is not always the wrong choice. If you are a team of one or two, or you specifically need a particular platform's depth and only a couple of people will ever touch it, paying per seat can be perfectly sensible. The maths turns against it as soon as you want more than a handful of people on the system, which, for most growing small businesses, is sooner than you would think.
So when you next price up a CRM, do the sum that matters: not the cost for one person, but the cost for everyone who should be using it. That is the number that decides whether per-seat or flat-rate is right for you.