Almost all business software is sold per user. It has become so normal that hardly anyone questions it. We did question it, and decided against it. Here's why, and what we do instead.
Per-user licences punish the wrong thing
A per-user price makes every additional person more expensive. That sounds fair, but it has a side effect: companies start rationing access.
Anyone who has negotiated a licence renewal knows the results. The temp doesn't get their own login and uses a colleague's. The warehouse works from printed lists because three extra licences aren't in the budget. The field team emails numbers instead of entering them. Every renewal turns into haggling over seats, and someone counts who last logged in.
The result is the opposite of what software is meant to do. Instead of everyone working with the same data, some work inside it and others work around it.
With your own apps, it gets absurd
Vibe coding adds a second reason. When teams build their own apps, a price per user and per app would be a brake on every new idea. If you're wondering whether a small app for five people is worth it, you should be thinking about the process, not about licences.
A shift handover app is most valuable when every shift actually uses it. An employee directory is only useful if everyone is in it. Software that makes a difference in a company needs everyone involved, not just the people who happened to get a licence.
What we charge for instead
Openbase.one is priced per workspace. Users, mailboxes and apps are unlimited on every plan. The plans differ only in what actually consumes resources: storage and outbound email.
- Starter, €199 per month: 250 GB of storage, 10,000 outbound emails per month.
- Growth, €349 per month: 1 TB of storage, 50,000 outbound emails per month.
- Scale, €549 per month: 5 TB of storage, 250,000 outbound emails per month.
- Enterprise: tailored, on request.
Every app from the App Store and every app you build yourself is included. There is no licence per app. Installing doesn't cost AI either: you get the published, checked version, with no build.
New people on the team cost nothing extra. Invite everyone who should be working with you: apprentices, temps, the warehouse, the field team, management.
AI at cost
One part of the cost really does depend on usage, and we say so openly: AI. When a build agent builds an app or an assistant summarises a file, model costs arise. You can't honestly squeeze those into a flat fee without either you overpaying or something being quietly throttled.
That's why there are AI credits. €1 of credit buys €1 of model cost, at the model's cost price. A 10 % service fee is added at top-up and shown openly on the invoice. You can turn on auto top-up, but you don't have to. Credits don't expire.
The honest limits
A workspace price isn't automatically cheaper for every company. A team of three that only needs email and files may pay more at €199 a month than for a handful of individual licences. The model pays off when many people work together and several tools come together in one workspace.
Support also costs extra if you want more than platform support. That is included in every plan: outages, defects, billing and security, on a best-effort basis. Help with your own apps comes with a support contract per workspace:
- Care, €890 per month: two named contacts, first response within one business day, four hours of help with your apps per month.
- Premium, €2,790 per month: five contacts, response within four business hours, twelve hours of help, review of new apps before they go live, a dedicated contact and a quarterly review.
Extra hours cost €170. There are also one-off packages: training for €490, onboarding for €1,990, and migration or an app built for you, each from €3,990.
These, too, are priced per workspace, not per user.
Do the maths yourself
We don't want to win you over with a sample calculation that just happens to favour us. Put your current licence costs next to your team size and look at which part grows with every new person. Then you'll know whether a workspace price suits you.
Our bet is simple: software becomes more valuable the more people in a company use it. A pricing model should reward that, not punish it.
Start for free
You can try Openbase.one for free, with a one-off €15 of AI credit and no credit card. All plans, support contracts and packages are on the pricing page.
Describe your first app and watch it go live, checked.
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