Why Shaire is priced per workspace, not per seat
Per-seat pricing puts a price on inviting someone. That is a strange thing to charge for in a tool whose whole job is shared context.
Almost every tool in this category charges per seat. Ten people, ten times the price. It is easy to explain, easy to forecast, and it quietly taxes the one thing the tool is for.
The invite you think twice about
Per-seat pricing means every invitation has a price attached. Not a large one — but large enough that somebody, at some point, does the arithmetic before adding a person.
The people you hesitate over are predictable. The designer who only needs to watch one project. The contractor on a six-week engagement. The person in support who keeps getting asked questions the engineering notes would answer. None of them will use the tool heavily. All of them would benefit from being able to read it.
So they get left out, and the context they needed gets copied into a message thread instead. The tool ends up with a smaller version of the truth in it than the company actually has, and the gaps are filled by whoever happens to be asked.
That is a bad outcome to have designed into the pricing page.
What we charge for instead
A flat price per workspace, in bands:
- Starter — up to 2 people, free.
- Team — up to 10 people, €20 a month.
- Growth — up to 25 people, €59 a month.
- Business — more than 25, quoted.
At ten people the Team plan is €2 per person per month, and on annual billing it is about €1.66. But the per-person figure is the wrong way to read it: the point is that adding a tenth person to a nine-person workspace costs nothing, so nobody has to think about it.
Every feature is on every plan
The other thing a plan usually decides is what you are allowed to do. Permissions on the enterprise tier. Reporting on the tier above yours. An integration held back as an upsell.
We do not do that, and the reason is not generosity. Feature gating makes the product worse to build: every capability grows a second question — which tier is this on? — and the answer has to be threaded through the UI, the API and the billing system. It makes the product worse to use too, because you find the boundary by walking into it.
So the plan sizes the workspace rather than unlocking it: how many people are in it, and how much they can store. Granular permissions, the git integration, saved views, cycles, reports, the whole block editor — all of it is in the free plan, for two people.
The honest part
Banded pricing has one real disadvantage, and it would be dishonest to write this without saying so: the step between bands is a step, not a slope. Going from ten people to eleven moves you from €20 to €59, and on that particular day the per-person price roughly doubles.
We think that is the better trade. A bill that changes three times in the life of a company is easier to live with than one that changes every time somebody joins — and it means the decision to add a person is never a budget decision.
Two people can use the whole thing for nothing, indefinitely, which is long enough to find out whether any of this holds up.