A Pricing Choice With Consequences
The default SaaS pricing model is per seat. Notion is $10 per user per month. Figma is $15 per user per month. Slack is $7.25 per user per month. Adobe Creative Cloud is $20.99 per seat per month for InDesign alone. Add Photoshop and Illustrator and you're at $59.99 per seat.
We picked a different model. Quaterio bills per organization. The Pro plan is $10 per month total for the whole team. The Business plan is $30 per month total. There is no per seat multiplier. Invite a team member, your bill doesn't change. Invite ten more, your bill still doesn't change.
This post explains why we picked this model and what it means if you're comparing Quaterio against per seat alternatives.
What Per Seat Costs Look Like at Realistic Team Sizes
For an individual designer or solo consultant, per seat pricing is fine. You pay for one seat and the math is easy.
For teams it adds up fast. Some honest comparisons:
5-person agency on InDesign:
- $20.99 × 5 seats × 12 months = $1,259/year on annual commitment
- $34.49 × 5 seats × 12 months = $2,069/year month to month
5-person agency on Quaterio Business:
- $30 × 12 months = $360/year, regardless of team size
The difference is $900 to $1,700 per year for the same team size. And Quaterio Business includes API access, batch generation up to 100 PDFs per call, version history and print ready output that InDesign either doesn't have or only offers via additional Creative Cloud apps.
10-person consultancy on Canva Teams:
- $9.99 × 10 seats × 12 months = $1,198/year (after the first 3 users at $100/year)
- Plus a setup fee
10-person consultancy on Quaterio Business:
- $30 × 12 months = $360/year
The savings scale linearly with team size. At 20 people, per seat alternatives cost $2,400 to $5,000 per year. Quaterio Business is still $360.
Why We Picked Per Organization Pricing
Three reasons that drove the decision.
1. The Decision to Invite Should Not Have a Cost
In a per seat model, every time a team lead invites someone to the workspace, they're spending money. Even if it's a small amount, it's a friction point. Over time, the result is that team leads delay invites, share logins to avoid the per seat charge (which violates most ToS but happens anyway), or restrict access to the document editor specifically to the people who "really need it."
That last one is the worst outcome from our perspective. The whole pitch for Quaterio is that document production should be in the hands of the people who own the content, sales teams writing proposals, ops teams producing invoices, support teams shipping reports, not gated to a designer who has the tool. Per seat pricing pushes accounts in the opposite direction: gate the tool to the few people with seats.
Per organization pricing removes the friction. Invite everyone. The bill doesn't change.
2. Documents Are an Organizational Asset, Not a Personal One
When a designer leaves a per seat tool, the org loses their seat license and usually buys again it for the replacement. The documents, templates and workflow logic that designer built are tied to the seat in a way that creates friction at handoff time.
Quaterio's content (documents, templates, brand kit, version history) belongs to the organization, not the individual user. Team members come and go; the organization keeps its assets and its history. Per organization pricing aligns the billing model with how the assets actually behave.
3. The Math Is Simpler at Purchase Time
Per seat pricing requires the buyer to forecast team size, predict invitation patterns, model what happens if the team grows or shrinks, and negotiate annual commits against potential headcount changes. Operations and procurement teams call this "seat planning" and it eats hours per quarter.
Per organization pricing is one decision: which tier (Free, Pro, Business, Enterprise). Pick the one that matches your feature needs and you're done. No headcount forecasting, no annual commit math, no renegotiation when the team changes.
For a 12-person consultancy this might save 20 minutes per quarter. For a 200-person enterprise procurement team evaluating dozens of tools, the simpler model reads as "less risk", which is what they actually care about.
Where Per Seat Makes Sense
Per organization isn't the right model for every tool. Some tools genuinely have per user costs that scale with usage:
- Tools that store user specific data at meaningful volume. Slack stores message history per user; the storage and search cost scales with team size. Per seat aligns the bill with the cost.
- Tools where each user is generating heavy compute. Code editors that run remote builds, analytics tools that run queries per user, IDE style products. Per seat reflects the marginal cost of each additional user.
- Tools that are explicitly priced as a wage replacement. Hiring a designer for $5k/month makes a $20/month tool with similar output absurdly cheap; per seat pricing here is partly about anchoring against the alternative cost (hiring).
Quaterio doesn't fit any of those patterns. Per organization makes sense because:
- The marginal cost of an additional team member is approximately zero (a few more rows in a Postgres table)
- The data is organizational, not user specific
- The pitch is enabling more team members to produce documents, not gating it to designers
What the Trade offs Are
Per organization pricing has real downsides we accepted:
Less Revenue From Large Customers
A 50-person customer paying us $30/month is real revenue, but a per seat competitor would extract $500 to $1,500/month from the same customer. We make less per large customer than a per seat competitor would.
We picked this trade off because the alternative, pricing high enough to extract per seat equivalent revenue from large customers, would make Quaterio too expensive for the small teams we want to start with. Most customers will start as a 1-5 person team and grow. Pricing at the small team end keeps acquisition easy.
Harder to Justify Enterprise Features
Per seat tools can spend on enterprise features (SSO, audit logs, role permissions) and justify it through the higher revenue per seat. Per organization pricing makes that math harder. The result is that some enterprise features ship on a higher tier (Enterprise) rather than being unlocked at Business.
Loss Leader at Very Large Scale
A 500-person organization on Quaterio Business pays $30/month for the whole team. That's a customer where the support burden, integration requirements and feature requests will eventually exceed the revenue. We address this through the Enterprise plan (custom pricing, SLAs, dedicated account management) for organizations large enough that per organization pricing stops making sense.
For the typical customer in the 1-50 person range, per organization works cleanly.
What This Means If You're Comparing Tools
A few practical notes if you're evaluating Quaterio against per seat alternatives:
- Use total cost, not headline price. Quaterio Business at $30 vs Canva Pro at $12.99 looks like Canva is cheaper. Multiply Canva by team size and the math reverses fast. For a 5-person team, Quaterio is roughly half the cost; for a 20-person team it's 5-10× cheaper.
- Factor in invite friction. If you're choosing a tool you want everyone to use (not just designers), per organization removes the friction that throttles adoption.
- Check the migration path. Some per seat tools make it hard to consolidate accounts or migrate ownership when team members leave. Per organization tools handle this naturally.
What This Doesn't Change
A few things people sometimes assume per organization pricing implies, which it doesn't:
- Team members are still users. Each person has their own login, their own profile, their own audit attribution. They're not sharing a login.
- Permissions are still per user. Quaterio has Owner, Admin and Member roles. Each team member has a specific role; not everyone has full access. Per organization billing is about cost, not flat access.
- You can still upgrade. Per organization tiers (Free, Pro, Business, Enterprise) still exist. You upgrade when you need more features or hit the resource limits of your current tier.
Try It
Sign up free and invite your whole team to test it. No per seat charge applies. Upgrade to Pro ($10/month) when you need clean PDFs without the free tier watermark, or Business ($30/month) when you need the API, version history, print ready export or batch generation.
For comparisons against the per seat alternatives, see the Canva, InDesign and Adobe Express pages.
