Why alifTeams charges flat annual pricing, not per seat
We just simplified pricing to one flat number per tier — $50 Starter, $200 Growth, $500 Business. The user count is a cap, not a multiplier.
Slack, Teams, Mattermost, and most of the team-chat market price the same way: a few dollars per user, per month, billed annually. The number looks small on its own. The number stops looking small the moment your team hits 20 people and you realise the monthly invoice has tripled.
We just retired that model. Here's what we charge now:
- Free — $0 forever cost, up to 5 users.
- Starter — $50 / year, up to 10 users.
- Growth — $200 / year, up to 25 users.
- Business — $500 / year, up to 50 users.
- Enterprise — for 50+ users; contact us.
Why flat-annual is the right shape for a 5–50 person team
Per-seat billing creates a friction every time you want to add a teammate. Should we bring the new contractor in? Should the marketing intern get access? Is it worth the +$15/month? The accounting team becomes the gatekeeper for software adoption. For a 25-person SME, this is the wrong tax — we want more of your team in alifTeams, not fewer.
Flat pricing removes the math. You pay $200 for Growth and you get 25 seats. Use 8, use 25 — same price. Bring in a contractor for two months, bring them out. No invoice surprises.
What it costs a 25-person team to keep paying per seat
| Vendor | Per user / year | 25-user team | Saved vs us |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slack Pro | ~$105 | $2,625 | $2,425 |
| Microsoft Teams Essentials | ~$48 | $1,200 | $1,000 |
| alifTeams Growth (us) | — | $200 | — |
Those numbers compound the larger your team gets. At 50 users, the gap against Slack Pro is more than $5,000/year — for the same primary feature (team chat).
Won't this break our margins?
Not as much as you'd think. The dominant cost in this product isn't per-seat compute — it's a fixed-ish blend of LLM gateway calls, Postgres + Redis, LiveKit minutes, and storage. We model worst-case usage at each tier and price so the median customer is comfortably profitable. Heavy outliers hit the fair-usage policy long before they break the math.
The Free tier is the whole product
Up to 5 users get every feature: chat, threads, all four AI agents, tasks, customers, contacts, calendar, 1-on-1 huddles, search. No credit card. We cap message count and history length, not features — the goal is for you to evaluate the actual product, then upgrade when your team grows.
If your team is over 50 people, we sell Enterprise — same product, plus SSO, audit logs, data residency, dedicated support, and a custom agreement. Get in touch.