Flat-rate project management software, not per user: what each tool charges instead

If you are looking for project management software on a flat rate rather than per user, you have already had the argument with yourself. You know what per-seat billing does to a small team. You want the list, not the case.

Here it is, with the part the round-ups leave out. A flat price is not a gift. It is a constraint the vendor resolves somewhere else, and where they resolve it is the only thing worth comparing.

Every flat price gets resolved somewhere

A flat plan charges a five-person team and a fifty-person team the same money for very different value. No vendor carries that indefinitely, so every flat plan has a hedge. In practice there are only four.

• Price. Set the number high enough that it only makes sense above a certain headcount.
• Metering. Give away the seats, charge for storage, traffic or compute.
• A bracket. Flat inside a band of users, a new price to leave it.
• A ceiling. Flat up to a stated number of people, then nothing.

Shopping this category is choosing which of those you can live with. They fail in different ways and a team can rationally prefer any of them. The case for flat billing over per-seat is a separate piece and this is not it — that argument is in the quiet cost of per-seat pricing.

Flat-rate project management tools, and what each charges instead

Every figure below comes from the vendor's own pricing page and was correct when this was written. Prices move; the links are the version that counts.

Price: Basecamp

Basecamp is the cleanest version of the trade because you can do the sum on one page. Pro Unlimited is "$299/month, billed annually" with "Unlimited users, no per-user fees" and five terabytes of storage. The per-user plan sitting next to it is "$15/user, billed monthly" (basecamp.com/pricing). Divide $3,588 a year by $180 per person per year and the flat plan overtakes the per-seat one at just under twenty people. Below that it is the more expensive choice, on purpose. Nothing is hidden: the resolution is the price tag, printed where you can see it.

Metering: Huly

Huly gives the seats away: every tier says "Unlimited users". What moves is storage and traffic. Common is $0 a month with "10GB Storage per Workspace" and "10GB Video/Audio Traffic". Rare is $19.99 a month for 100 GB of each. Epic is $99.99 a month for a terabyte of storage and 500 GB of traffic (huly.io/pricing). AI is listed as "TBD" on every tier, which is best read as a line item nobody has priced yet.

The catch is the axis, not the number. Headcount is something you decide, once, deliberately. Storage and traffic accumulate whether anyone decides anything. If the work is documents and calls, the bill goes back to being something you watch — the exact property you were trying to get rid of.

A bracket: Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is flat inside a band. Basic is $49 a month billed annually and "includes 5 users". Standard is $99 billed annually and "includes 50 users". Professional is $199 billed annually and "includes 100 users" (bitrix24.com/prices). Inside a band, the next person is free. Leaving one costs $50 a month at the first step.

That is per-seat pricing with the granularity turned down. The bill still tracks headcount, in fewer and larger steps, and the step is invisible until you are standing on it.

A ceiling: ProofHub, and us

ProofHub takes the seat count out entirely — Essential is "$45 / month billed annually" with "Unlimited users" — and resolves against projects and storage instead: 40 projects, 15 GB. Ultimate Control lifts the project cap and takes storage to 100 GB, and its price is worth reading twice: the "$89 / month billed annually" and "$99/m billed monthly" figures on the page are an introductory rate that "lasts for 3 months from date of purchase", after which the plan is $135 a month billed annually or $150 billed monthly (proofhub.com/pricing). The ceiling is there, it just sits on projects rather than people.

Ours sits on people, and the number is 50.

Kevta Pro is $10 per workspace per month. That buys 10 workspaces, 10 boards in each, and 50 members per workspace, where members means everyone who can reach anything in it — the owner included, plus board-only guests. Free is $0 with 2 workspaces, 5 boards each and 10 members. Those three numbers are the whole meter. There is no storage tier and no traffic charge, and the honest reason is not generosity: Kevta has no file attachments, so there is nothing to meter. What the caps count is things you create, not volume you accumulate.

Fifty is a real ceiling and we would rather print it than soften it. A flat $10 a month with an open seat count is not a price, it is an exposure — and a customer who finds the ceiling by walking into it has been misled whatever the pricing page implied.

Where Basecamp is straightforwardly better than we are

Basecamp's flat plan is more honestly flat than ours. Pro Unlimited has no seat count at all — not a high one, none. If your objection to per-seat billing is that you do not want a number attached to people, Basecamp satisfies it and we do not. We moved the number; they removed it.

The free tier goes the same way. Basecamp Free is "1 project free forever. Includes 1 GB of storage and up to 20 users" (basecamp.com/pricing), twice Kevta Free's 10-member cap. A fifteen-person company with one thing to track gets a real answer at $0, and we have nothing equivalent.

And a flat price is a promise about the future, worth roughly what the company making it is worth. Kevta is in beta, with no importer and no export, so arriving means retyping and leaving is worse than it should be. Weigh our promise accordingly.

Where flat rate loses to per user

Two places, and the first is arithmetic.

At the small end, per-seat is simply cheaper, and against most of this table it stays cheaper for far longer. ClickUp's Unlimited plan is $7 per user per month billed yearly (clickup.com/pricing); Linear's Basic is $10 per user per month billed yearly (linear.app/pricing). Against our flat $10, one ClickUp seat is cheaper and one Linear seat is a tie, so flat only starts winning at the second person. Against ProofHub's $45 or Bitrix24's $49 you need five to seven people first, and against Basecamp's $299, twenty. Flat is not a synonym for cheap. It is a synonym for stable, and stability only pays once you have enough headcount to be unstable.

The second is that free tiers do not follow the model at all, and some of them beat every flat plan here on the exact axis flat pricing exists to fix. Linear Free carries "Unlimited members" and meters issues instead — 250 of them, across 2 teams. ClickUp's Free Forever advertises "Unlimited Free Plan Members" against 60 MB of storage. Neither meters people, and both are better than Kevta Free's 10-member cap on that specific point. Asana goes the other way entirely: "Up to 2 users can collaborate for free", with Starter at $10.99 "Per user, per month billed annually" (asana.com/pricing). Free plans deserve their own table and have one in what nine free plans give a team of six.

Which one fits you

One or two people. Stay per-seat, or stay free. Linear Free and ClickUp Free both refuse to meter members, which no flat plan here matches at $0 except Huly's Common tier.

Twenty or more, and you never want to think about headcount again. Basecamp Pro Unlimited — the expensive answer, and the only one with no seat count in it.

A team whose size you can predict for a year. Bitrix24's bracket. Size it once with room, and check where the next step lands before you sign — that is the number that will surprise you.

People-heavy, storage-light work. Huly or ProofHub. A meter on a resource you barely touch is a meter you never feel.

A small software team under fifty that wants issues tied to git. Us — though at $10 a month the model is not the reason to pick Kevta, it is the reason it stops being something you manage. Pro is per workspace with no annual commitment. Cancel whenever; the workspace keeps Pro until the paid period ends, then drops to Free with nothing deleted, and only creating the next board or member waits.

Kevta is in beta. If flat pricing is the shape you want and 50 is a number your team will not meet, join the waitlist — it gets you an early invite, a founding-member price at launch, and a direct line into what we build next.

Disclosure

We build one of the tools on this page and we chose flat pricing, so read this as an argument for our own model. Every competitor figure above is quoted from that vendor's own pricing page and linked, and where a competitor's flat plan beats ours we have said which and why.

Kevta's current numbers are on the pricing page, which is the version that counts if this post has gone stale.