Where we stand
HRMZY charges a flat fee per workspace, so we plainly benefit if you conclude that flat fees are better. That is precisely why this post shows its working and names the headcount range where a per-seat competitor costs less than we do. Arithmetic that only ever comes out in the author's favour is advertising, not arithmetic. The figures below are computed live from the same sourced table our comparison page uses, and they say what they say.
Short answer
Per-employee pricing is cheaper on small teams and more expensive on large ones; a flat fee does the reverse. Neither model is fairer than the other — they cross over at a headcount you can calculate in about a minute. This post does that arithmetic at 10, 50 and 200 people using vendor prices read from each vendor's own page and dated, and it names the headcounts where a per-seat competitor costs less than our own flat fee.
Written by
Subhan Khan, Founder
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Pricing
Competitor prices were read from each vendor's own pricing page: BambooHR, Gusto, Zoho People on 18 August 2026; Factorial, Keka on 24 August 2026. HRMZY's own figures are read live from our plans, so they cannot go stale here.
There are really only two ways HR software is priced, and choosing between them is not a matter of principle. Per-employee pricing charges for each head; a flat fee charges for the workspace. At small headcounts the first is cheaper, at large headcounts the second is, and the only question that matters is which side of the crossover your company sits on — today, and after the hiring you are actually planning. Almost everything else in a pricing conversation is downstream of that one fact.
The models, precisely
Four shapes cover every HR platform priced in this post. Knowing which one you are looking at tells you more than the headline number does.
Per employee, per month
The commonest model. One rate multiplied by headcount, so the bill moves every time you hire and every time someone leaves. It is the cheapest possible way to start and the most expensive way to grow, and it has the virtue of being perfectly linear: you can work out your bill at any future headcount with a single multiplication.
Per employee, with a floor
The same model with a minimum charge on small teams, usually because a vendor's sales and support costs do not shrink below a certain size. It behaves like a flat fee up to the floor and like a per-seat rate above it. If your headcount sits under the floor, you are effectively paying the floor — which is how a per-seat vendor ends up being the most expensive option for a very small company.
Base fee plus per person
A fixed platform charge with a per-head rate on top. It is common in payroll-first products, where the fixed cost is the filing machinery and the variable cost is the person being filed for. It is the hardest of the four to compare on headline price, because the base fee makes it look expensive at small sizes while the per-head rate is what actually decides the bill later on.
Flat fee per workspace
One price for the whole company up to a headcount cap, after which you move to a larger plan. The bill does not move when you hire, which is both the main advantage and the main trap: the step between plans is a cliff, and a company one person over a cap pays the whole of the next plan. Ours works this way and does exactly that, which is why there is a section below on when a flat fee is the wrong shape.
The arithmetic at 10, 50 and 200 people
Every competitor figure below is computed from a price read from that vendor's own pricing page on the date shown beside it, and wherever there is a multiplication to check it is printed under the cell, so you can check it rather than take it on trust. Where a vendor publishes no rate, the cell says so instead of guessing at one.
| Platform | Pricing model | 10 people | 50 people | 200 people | Figure read |
|---|
| Zoho People | Per employee | $15/mo
$1.50 × 10 | $75/mo
$1.50 × 50 | $300/mo
$1.50 × 200 | www.zoho.com
2026-08-18 |
|---|
| Gusto | Base fee plus per person | $109/mo
$49 + ($6 × 10) | $349/mo
$49 + ($6 × 50) | $1,249/mo
$49 + ($6 × 200) | gusto.com
2026-08-18 |
|---|
| BambooHR | Per employee, with a flat minimum on small teams | from $250/mo
flat minimum at 25 or fewer | up to $500/mo
$10 × 50, list | up to $2,000/mo
$10 × 200, list | www.bamboohr.com
2026-08-18 |
|---|
| Factorial | Per employee | $80/mo
$8 × 10 | $400/mo
$8 × 50 | $1,600/mo
$8 × 200 | factorialhr.com
2026-08-24 |
|---|
| Keka | Quote only | Quote only | Quote only | Quote only | www.keka.com
2026-08-24 |
|---|
| HRMZY | Flat fee per workspace, up to a headcount cap | $25/mo
Standard, cap 20 | $80/mo
Premium, cap 200 | $80/mo
Premium, cap 200 | our pricing page
live plans |
|---|
One of the five competitors above publishes no rate at all on its own pricing page — Keka. That is a finding rather than a gap in the research: you cannot compare it on cost without entering a sales conversation, which is worth knowing before you start one.
BambooHR publishes automatic volume discounts above its small-team minimum but does not publish the discounted rate, so the larger figures in that row are a list ceiling rather than what a company of that size would pay. We show the list price because it is the only figure the vendor publishes.
Left out: Personio. When we last read its pricing page, on 18 August 2026, it published no rate at all — and that has since changed: the page now headlines a starting rate per employee per month in euros. Every other row here is a US-dollar list price billed monthly, and dropping a euro figure into the same column would quietly break the basis that makes the rest comparable. Personio comes back into this table once it has been re-read on that basis.
Read the model column before the totals: it explains most of what looks strange in them. The row that looks most expensive at 10 people is not expensive because its rate is high, and the two rows with no figure at all are not missing data.
Where per-employee pricing wins, including against us
The sentence below is computed from the same sourced rows our comparison page uses, and it is the same string that page prints, so the two cannot quietly drift apart on where a competitor beats us:
Zoho People Essential HR costs less than HRMZY at 1–16 employees and 21–53 employees — HRMZY's plan caps are why the gap opens twice. From about 54 employees up, flat pricing pulls away: at 200 employees HRMZY is $80 a month against $300–$2,000 for the publicly-priced HR tools, before add-ons.
That sentence is computed over publicly priced HR point tools only, on list price billed monthly in US dollars, and its upper figure is a list price from a vendor that discounts at volume without publishing the discounted rate. It is not a claim about every HR platform, about annual-commitment rates, or about the all-in-one suites — those sit in separate tables on the comparison page, each with its own scope note.
Two things follow. The first is that if you are a small team, the cheapest per-seat HR tool in this table really is cheaper than us, and you should buy it unless you need the scope we cover — the full table, with the scope columns that matter for that decision, is on our comparison page. The second is that the gap opens twice rather than once, and the reason is our own plan caps rather than anything the competitor is doing. A flat fee with caps is not a smooth line. It steps, and between steps a per-seat rival can slip underneath it again.
What the arithmetic leaves out
A price comparison only means something between products of the same scope, and these are not. Four things the totals above do not capture:
- Scope is not matched. The cheapest per-seat plan in the table is core HR — records, onboarding, leave. Payroll is a separate product from the same vendor, and there is no CRM, project management or invoicing in it at all. Setting it beside a plan that includes those is comparing two different purchases that happen to share a category name.
- Add-ons are not in the totals. Where a vendor sells time tracking, HR content or benefits administration as a separate line, the figure shown is the base plan only. In practice the distance between a headline price and an invoice is usually add-ons rather than the rate.
- Annual billing changes the numbers. Every figure here is a monthly-billed list price, applied to every row including our own, because mixing a monthly rate with an annual-commitment rate is the commonest way these comparisons go wrong. Of the vendors priced above, only Zoho People publishes a lower annual-commitment rate alongside its monthly one. So do we. For the rest we read the monthly figure only.
- Currencies are not mixed. Every figure is in US dollars, which is why one vendor that has since started publishing a euro rate is left out of the table rather than converted into it at a rate we chose.
So use the table for the shape of each model rather than as a verdict. The shape is the durable part. The specific rates are re-checked quarterly, and the date each one was read is in the final column for exactly this reason.
The effects that never make it into the spreadsheet
Two pricing models with an identical total at your current headcount still behave differently, because a price is also an incentive. What follows are mechanisms rather than measurements: we have no survey data on any of this and are not going to invent any.
Per-seat pricing puts a price on every marginal person, which quietly turns things that should not be pricing decisions into pricing decisions. Does the part-time bookkeeper get a login? The seasonal staff? The contractor who is here for six weeks? Each one is now a small purchase with a small argument attached, and the cheap answer to each is to leave that person out of the system. That is how a second spreadsheet gets started, and a second spreadsheet costs more than a seat.
Flat pricing removes that friction and replaces it with a cliff. You can add anybody at no marginal cost right up to the cap, and then the next person costs the difference between two plans. The incentive near the top of a band is to delay, or to leave somebody out — which is the same failure as above, relocated to a different headcount.
The third difference is forecasting. A flat fee is a known number for the year whatever your hiring does; a per-seat bill is a function of a headcount plan that will not survive contact with the year. If you are the person who has to defend a budget, that difference is worth something real, and it appears in no comparison table anywhere.
When a flat fee is the wrong shape
Three cases where you should not buy ours
Stated plainly, because a pricing post that cannot describe its own model's weaknesses is not a pricing post.
- You are small and staying small. Below the crossover a per-seat core-HR tool costs less, and if you do not need payroll, projects, CRM and invoicing in the same place, the extra scope is not worth paying for. The crossover sentence above names the vendor and the exact headcounts.
- You sit just above a cap. A flat fee with caps steps, and the step is the whole of the next plan. A company a few people over a cap pays for capacity it will not use for a year or more. Check where you land against the caps before you compare totals, not afterwards.
- You need one thing done exceptionally well. If payroll in a particular country, or an applicant tracking system for high-volume hiring, is the actual problem you are solving, a specialist priced per seat will usually beat a generalist priced flat — and the right comparison then is against that specialist, not against a suite.
Working out your own number
It takes about a minute, and it is the only calculation that matters, because it uses your headcount rather than a representative one.
Take your current headcount and the headcount you honestly expect in eighteen months — not the optimistic one. Multiply each by the per-seat rate of the tool you are considering, remembering to add any base fee and any add-ons you would genuinely buy rather than the ones you would do without. Then compare both totals against the flat-fee plan that covers the larger headcount, not the smaller one, because the larger one is the plan you will actually be on. If the per-seat total passes the flat fee before your eighteen-month figure, the flat fee is the cheaper purchase over the period you are really buying for.
If you want the admin hours in the same sum, the HR software ROI calculator covers that side of it, and our own plans and their caps are on the pricing page.
How these figures were obtained
Each was read in a browser rather than fetched by a script, because several vendors either render prices in JavaScript or refuse automated requests outright. A script that comes back empty has learned nothing about a vendor's pricing, and reporting that as "no published price" would be a fabrication.
"Quote only" therefore means the vendor publishes no rate on its own pricing page. It never means a fetch failed, and it is not a judgement about the vendor — only a statement that their cost cannot honestly be put in a table by anyone.
Prices move. Our practice is to re-check these quarterly and to pull any figure older than six months rather than show it, because a stale price table is worse than no price table: it is quotable and wrong. That is a standing instruction to ourselves, not something the page enforces — so if you are reading this long after the dates in the final column, check the vendor's page before you rely on a number from it.
The short version
Per-employee pricing is not a trick, and a flat fee is not a favour. They are two different bets about how your headcount is going to move, and the honest comparison between them is one multiplication against your own numbers. Do it at the headcount you expect rather than the one you have, check what each price actually buys before you compare the totals, and be suspicious of any vendor — this one included — whose arithmetic only ever comes out in their own favour.