Why we don’t charge per person

Almost every tool in our category charges by the seat. Notion, Linear, Todoist: each person on the team costs something every month. It’s the default for a good reason — revenue grows with the customer on its own, without anyone having to sell anything.

We chose not to. Clusker has one flat price for the whole team, and inviting one more person never changes the bill. Here’s why.

Per-seat pricing fights the product

Clusker exists to pull a team’s work into one place. Tasks, documents, reference bases and money all hang off the project, so nobody has to remember which of five apps something ended up in.

A per-seat price quietly works against that. Every invitation turns into a small budget decision, and small budget decisions usually end in “let’s not.” Nobody adds the accountant who needs to see two documents. Nobody invites the contractor who’s with you for a month. So the accountant gets a PDF by email, the contractor gets a chat thread, and the work leaks back out into exactly the places Clusker was supposed to replace.

If a price makes you hesitate before inviting someone, it’s charging you for using the product the way it’s meant to be used.

There’s a second, plainer reason. Small businesses are tired of per-seat subscriptions. They’re the first line to go when money gets tight, and a bill that changes every time the team does is hard to plan around.

A ladder, the way Basecamp does it

We didn’t invent this. Basecamp has charged one flat price per company for twenty years, and it’s the only model in this class with that kind of track record. We borrowed the shape: plans climb with what actually grows as your work grows — active projects and storage. Not features, and not headcount.

• Free — $0. One person, 3 active projects, 1 GB.
• Solo — $9 a month. One person, 10 active projects, 25 GB.
• Studio — $39 a month. Unlimited people, 10 active projects, 100 GB.
• Pro — $99 a month. Unlimited people, 25 active projects, 500 GB.
• Unlimited — $299 a month, billed yearly. Unlimited people, unlimited projects, 2 TB.

Solo, Studio and Pro can also be paid yearly, for the price of ten months. If you need Clusker on your own server, that’s available on request.

Why active projects? Because it’s a limit you can feel. Nobody notices crossing a storage threshold — our own five teams, with 43 projects between them, take up 16 MB. But the day you start an eleventh project, you know exactly why you’re moving up. The customer asks for the upgrade; no salesperson has to.

Isn’t Solo just a seat by another name?

It’s a fair question, since Solo is priced for one person. The test we use is simple: does the bill get bigger because you invited someone? On Studio, Pro and Unlimited the answer is no, and it stays no.

Solo is for someone who doesn’t have a team at all — an architect, a lawyer, a consultant with their own practice. The only difference between Solo and Studio is other people; both include ten active projects. So the step up fits in one sentence: bringing in a second person means Studio at $39 a month. Bringing in the fifteenth costs nothing more.

Every feature, on every plan

There are no feature locks. The password vault, canvas, reference bases, finances, guest links and the MCP connector are on every plan, Free included.

That isn’t generosity; it’s a rule we hold ourselves to. Clusker is meant to be a finished product from the first screen, and a plan with half its screens taken away isn’t finished. Plans differ in how much you do, not in what you’re allowed to do.

The trade-off we’re accepting

Flat pricing has a real cost, and we’d rather name it. A team of sixty pays the same as a team of five and will probably ask more of us. Our revenue won’t grow with a customer by itself; it grows only when new teams arrive.

The exact thresholds may move, too. Three, ten and twenty-five projects follow Basecamp’s pattern and haven’t yet been tested against our own paying customers — we expect the first of them to tell us where we got it wrong. What won’t move is the shape: one price for the team, and never a price per person.