The Per-Seat Pricing Problem in Accounting Software

The problem is the model, not the number

Any price can be fair. The trouble with per-seat pricing is behavioural: it attaches a marginal cost to giving a colleague access, so access becomes a decision — and in small firms, decisions with a price attached default to no. The software's coverage of the firm shrinks quietly from there.

This piece is an argument, so the position up front: for a system of record — the tool meant to hold every client, task and deadline — per-seat pricing works against the product's own purpose. For other categories of software it can be perfectly reasonable, and we will get to those.

Seat rationing, and what it does to the record

Ration seats and predictable things follow: two staff share a login, the admin works from exported spreadsheets, the seasonal preparer emails updates for someone else to type in. Each workaround saves a licence and costs the one thing the system exists to provide — a trustworthy record of who did what.

Shared logins are the worst of it. Once two people are one user, task ownership, notification targeting and any audit trail stop meaning anything — and unpicking that later, mid-season, is nobody's idea of a project.

Accounting firms staff for seasons; licences do not

A Canadian firm's headcount is a curve — seasonal preparers in for T1 season, students at year-end — while per-seat licensing is a step function that rises easily and falls through cancellation admin. Firms end up paying summer prices for January's team, or rationing in January itself.

The rationing usually wins, and it lands at the worst time: the weeks when the most deadline-critical work is moving through the most temporary hands are exactly the weeks the temporary hands lack access.

A tax on the behaviour you want more of

Per-seat pricing charges a firm for delegating, documenting and bringing juniors into the system — the behaviours practice management exists to encourage. When adding a new hire to the workflow tool has a monthly price, some firms delay it, and the hire learns to work around the system immediately.

Habits set in the first week harden. A preparer who spends one season working from forwarded emails and side spreadsheets does not migrate into the system in May; the firm simply carries a parallel process from then on.

Where per-seat pricing is perfectly fair

Per-seat pricing is honest where value genuinely scales per user: a tax-preparation licence used by three preparers, a ledger subscription per bookkeeper, a design tool for the one person who designs. Vendors are not villains for metering usage — the model fails specifically where coverage is the point.

That is the test worth applying to any tool: does it deliver value per user, or per firm? A system of record delivers almost all of its value from being complete — every client, every task, every person — which is exactly what per-user pricing discourages.

What flat pricing changes in practice

With one price for the whole firm, access stops being a decision. The January preparer gets an account on day one, the admin sees the same client record as the partner, and nobody shares a login — because no maths makes any of that expensive.

This is the model SpidNums chose deliberately: one plan at USD $1,200 per firm per year, everything included, unlimited clients and unlimited team members. Not because unlimited sounds generous, but because a practice system with partial coverage of the practice fails at its actual job.

Questions to ask any vendor about pricing

Whatever tool you are evaluating, the pricing model deserves the same scrutiny as the feature list — it will shape how your team uses the product long after the demo ends.

• What does a seasonal staff member cost for three months, including the admin of adding and removing them?
• Which features sit in higher tiers, and is anything on the must-have list gated behind the top one?
• What happens to the price at renewal?
• If we ration seats to save money, what breaks — task ownership, notifications, the audit trail?
• What does the total cost look like at our expected headcount in three years?