Per-active-client pricing: why agencies shouldn't pay per seat

Almost every SaaS tool in the agency stack charges per seat. The billing page asks: "How many people on your team need access?"

For an agency, this is the wrong question. The right question is: "How many clients are you running?"

The seat-based trap

Imagine a 10-person agency running 5 clients. On a typical per-seat tool at $30/user/month:

• Account managers need access: 2 × $30 = $60
• Campaign managers need access: 3 × $30 = $90
• Designers need access: 2 × $30 = $60
• Leadership needs access: 1 × $30 = $30
• Freelancers who occasionally log in: 2 × $30 = $60

Monthly cost: $300 — before you've run any work.

Now the agency adds a client. Revenue goes up. SaaS cost stays the same. Great unit economics — until you hire.

You hire two more campaign managers to keep up. Monthly cost: $360. You didn't add any clients. You added capacity. Why did the tool get more expensive?

Now flip it: you lose two clients. You don't fire anyone (of course). Monthly cost stays at $360. Your agency shrank but your software bill didn't.

Per-seat pricing rewards under-staffing and punishes hiring. That's backwards for a service business where headcount is the product.

The viewer problem

The workaround most agencies use: buy "viewer" seats for some users, "full" seats for others. In practice, this creates two problems:

1. Internal permission theatre. The campaign manager needs to comment on a task. That's a paid action in most tools. So you either buy them a full seat or you ask them to DM the account manager. Neither is good.
2. Client portal gymnastics. Half the tools treat client portal access as a separate seat tier. The other half don't offer client portals at all, so agencies build their own out of shared Drive folders.

Per-active-client pricing

The mental model Phloz uses: pay for what you're running, not who's running it.

• A "client" in Phloz is a workspace entity with contacts, projects, tasks, files, messages, and a tracking map.
• An active client is one that has had activity in the last 60 days (task, message, file, comment, map edit). Archived or dormant clients don't count.
• Tiers are priced by active-client cap: Pro (10), Growth (30), Business (100), Scale (250), Enterprise (unlimited).
• Seats are included up to a reasonable number per tier (5 / 8 / 15 / 30). Extra seats are cheap ($5.99–$9.99/mo depending on tier), but most agencies never hit the cap.
• Client viewers are free. Client portal access doesn't count against any seat.

This does two things:

1. Hiring is free. A new campaign manager joins, gets access to every client they work on, doesn't cost extra until you hit the seat cap — and even then, they're cheaper than a per-seat tool.
2. Your bill tracks your book of business. More clients = more revenue = higher tier. Fewer clients = lower tier. The software cost actually follows the business.

What about over-sized agencies with few huge clients?

A 30-person team managing 4 enterprise clients is a different beast. Those agencies should be on the Scale tier or Enterprise — priced for the seat count, not the client count. We keep extra-seat pricing low so a 30-person team isn't penalized.

What about freelancers and contractors?

Two paths:

• If they contribute to specific clients, add them as a paid seat ($5.99–$9.99/mo). Cheap.
• If they only see deliverables, add them as a viewer. Free.

Why this model is sustainable for us

Per-active-client pricing means Phloz's revenue grows with our customers' book of business — not with their team size. This is the unit economics we want: aligned with our customers' revenue, not their HR choices.

If the agency shrinks, Phloz's revenue shrinks. That's fine. We'd rather have a fair deal than a good quarter.

See the full tier breakdown on the pricing page.