Fifteen pounds per person, per month. On a pricing page, it barely registers. It is less than a team lunch, and far less than the time the software saves.
It is also a number that never stops. It arrives every month, it grows every time you hire, and in five years’ time you will still be paying it: for the same software, doing the same job.
Per-user pricing is designed to look small. This post does the sums properly, using an HR system as the example, and shows what the same money buys when it goes into software built around your organisation instead.
The arithmetic nobody does at sign-up
Take a company of 60 people on a typical HR platform: holiday requests, absence records, staff documents and onboarding checklists, at £15 per user per month.
That is £900 a month, or £10,800 a year.
Over five years, if the company never grows, it spends £54,000. If it grows steadily to 80 people, the bill rises with every hire and the total reaches £63,000. Neither figure includes a single price rise.
And what does the company have at the end of it? The same system it had in year one, and a larger invoice.
The subscription rarely gets questioned, because every individual decision sounds reasonable:
“It’s only £15 a head.”
“We’ll look at it again when we’re bigger.”
“Everyone else uses it.”
None of these is wrong on the day it is said. Added up over five years, they are expensive.
Every new starter comes with a monthly charge
The real problem with per-user pricing is not the price. It is what the price is attached to.
Hire someone and the HR system costs more, although it does no extra work worth mentioning. A seasonal team, a contractor who needs a few documents, a manager who only approves holidays: each one carries the same fee as the people who use the system every day.
Over time, that starts to shape decisions it shouldn’t. People are left off the system to keep the bill down, or share access they shouldn’t share. Software meant to bring your people together becomes a reason to leave some of them out.
The same company, with software built for it
Now take the same company and the same needs, and build the system around how it actually works: its own approval steps, its own documents, its own way of recording leave and absence.
A system like this sits comfortably within the £5,000 to £30,000 range that most small and medium-sized projects fall into. For this example, call it £16,000, agreed as a fixed price before any work starts.
After that, there is one flat yearly fee for hosting, maintenance and support. Here it is £900 a year: the cost of a single month of the old subscription.
That fee does not change with headcount. The 61st employee costs nothing extra. Neither does the 80th.
| £15 per user, per month | Built for you | |
|---|---|---|
| Up front | £0 | £16,000, at a fixed price |
| Every year | £10,800, and more with every hire | £900, whatever the headcount |
| Five years at 60 people | £54,000 | £20,500 |
| Five years, growing to 80 | £63,000 | £20,500 |
The bespoke system costs more in its first year. Around month 20, it has paid for itself. Over five years it costs £20,500 against £54,000, a difference of £33,500, and £42,500 if the company grows.
Put simply: once it is built, the company pays for one month a year instead of twelve.
What the money pays for
A subscription spreads its price across thousands of customers, so every customer pays for features built for all of them: modules nobody opens, settings people work around, and a roadmap decided somewhere else.
A bespoke system is priced on what you need. Leave requests that follow your approval chain. Absence records in the format your managers already use. Onboarding documents that match your own contracts. And, where they allow it, connections to the tools you already rely on, such as your payroll provider or Microsoft 365, rather than another login to replace them.
It is fully documented and handed over, so you are never tied to us. The yearly fee keeps it hosted, maintained and supported for as long as you want that, and no longer.
When the subscription is the better deal
Bespoke software is not automatically cheaper, and it is worth being clear about when it isn’t.
With a small team, the sums change. At ten people, £15 a head is £1,800 a year, and a build would take years to pay for itself.
If a ready-made product already does what you need, without workarounds, its development cost is shared across all of its customers. That is good value, and you should keep it.
And some software has to keep pace with rules that change, such as payroll and tax. A product that updates for every change in the law is doing work you would otherwise pay for.
Bespoke makes sense when three things are true: enough people use the system that the per-head fee adds up, your process doesn’t fit the product without workarounds, and it is something you expect to rely on for years.
Run your own numbers
You do not need a consultant to see whether this applies to you. Take one subscription and answer three questions:
“What do we pay per user, per month?”
“How many users will we have in three years?”
“Which features do we actually use?”
Multiply the first two by twelve and you have the yearly cost of standing still. The third tells you how much of it pays for things nobody opens.
If the answer is uncomfortable, it is worth a conversation. Tell us what you pay today and what you use it for, and we will tell you honestly whether software built for you would cost less, and by how much. If it wouldn’t, we will say so.
Fifteen pounds a head is a small number. Paid by every person, every month, for years, it isn’t.