Last Updated on August 19, 2026
We read the live pricing pages of 27 business software vendors and recorded what a UK buyer actually sees. Most of them do not quote a price in pounds.
Per-seat pricing looks like the simplest model in software. A price, a number of people, multiply.
It is not simple, and for a small UK business it is not linear. We checked 27 live pricing pages across live chat, HR and CRM software to find out what a UK buyer is really quoted.
Executive summary
Only nine of 27 quote you a price in pounds
Nine vendors published a genuine GBP figure a UK buyer can read and act on: Zendesk on its UK site, Sage HR, BrightHR, Breathe HR, CharlieHR, Employment Hero UK, Factorial UK, Salesforce UK and Microsoft Dynamics 365 UK.
Thirteen published US dollars only: Intercom, LiveChat, Tidio, Freshchat, Help Scout, Crisp, Front, BambooHR, Deel, Pipedrive, HubSpot, Freshsales and monday CRM.
Two offer sterling behind a currency selector that did not render a figure to us: Capsule CRM and Zoho CRM.
Three publish no price at all. HiBob and Personio by design, both routing you to a demo booking form. Personio’s page says its pricing depends on several factors and directs you to book a call.
The pattern is clean. Every one of the nine sterling publishers is either UK-domiciled or runs a dedicated UK domain or /uk/ path. Not one US-headquartered vendor with a single global pricing page quoted sterling.
A UK web address is not a UK price
Pipedrive’s pricing sits at pipedrive.com/en-gb/pricing and quotes US dollars throughout. The /en-gb/ in the address changes the language, not the currency. It is worth checking the symbol rather than the URL.
The advertised price is almost never the price
Only six of the 27 state VAT treatment clearly on the pricing page itself. For nearly every headline figure a UK buyer sees, add 20 per cent.
The ones that do say so are worth naming, because clarity is rare enough to be a feature. CharlieHR states that all prices exclude UK VAT, charged at plus 20 per cent on the base price. Sage HR shows VAT as a live line in its calculator: £4.60 a month becomes £5.52 with £0.92 of VAT added. Breathe HR states prices are exclusive of VAT, twice. BrightHR marks every figure “exc. tax”. Crisp explains its position in full. Microsoft Dynamics 365 UK carries “Price does not include VAT” on every tier.
Salesforce UK, Zendesk UK, Employment Hero UK, Factorial, HubSpot, monday CRM, Intercom, Freshchat, Front, Help Scout, Tidio, BambooHR and Deel carry no VAT wording on the pricing page at all.
It is a staircase, not a slope
This is the part that catches out growing businesses, and it is entirely published.
The two most popular UK-native HR tools price in bands by headcount. Your bill does not creep up as you hire. It jumps.
| Vendor | The hire that changes the band | Before | After | Increase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CharlieHR | 5th employee | £5 a month | £45 a month | +800% |
| CharlieHR | 15th employee | £45 a month | £105 a month | +133% |
| CharlieHR | 30th employee | £105 a month | £180 a month | +71% |
| Breathe HR | 11th employee | £24 a month | £44 a month | +83% |
| Breathe HR | 21st employee | £44 a month | £99 a month | +125% |
| Breathe HR | 101st employee | £175 a month | £419 a month | +139% |
| Crisp | 5th agent | $45 a month | $95 a month | +111% |
All figures exclude VAT. Increases are Whito calculations from the published band prices.
The CharlieHR jump has a wrinkle worth knowing. The £5 rate applies for the first six months and rises to £20 afterwards, and CharlieHR states that crossing out of the 1 to 4 band automatically removes the introductory discount. So the fifth hire can land on the same invoice as the end of the intro period.
Live chat tools do the same thing with seat caps rather than headcount. Help Scout’s Standard plan is capped at 25 users and Plus at 50, so your 26th user forces a plan change regardless of what features you need. Front caps Starter at 10 seats and Professional at 50.
Minimums that invert the headline price
A per-seat price only tells you the truth if you can buy one seat.
- monday CRM advertises $12 per seat on Basic, with a three-seat minimum. The real entry price is $36 a month.
- BambooHR advertises $10 per employee. Below 25 employees you pay a flat floor starting at $250 a month. A ten-person UK firm pays $25 a head, not $10.
- BrightHR shows “from £16.67 per employee” alongside £83.35 a month excluding tax, which works out at a five-employee minimum.
- Employment Hero UK states a minimum of 10 users, putting a £40 a month floor under its £4 per employee HR Essentials tier.
- Microsoft Relationship Sales requires a 10-seat minimum.
- HubSpot charges a mandatory one-time onboarding fee of $1,500 on Professional and $3,500 on Enterprise, payable before you use the product.
“From £X” is sometimes not a real price
BrightHR advertises “From £16.67 per employee per month” at the top of its pricing page. Further down the same page, its own FAQ states that prices start from £3.00 per person depending on business size, and recommends booking a demo for an accurate quote.
Those two figures are more than five times apart, on one page. Only one of them can guide a purchase, and the page does not tell you which.
The add-ons are also charged per seat
The base seat price is a starting point at most vendors. The extras stack on top of every seat, every month.
Zendesk UK: Copilot £40 per agent, Workforce Engagement £40 per agent, Contact Center £72 per agent. On a £45 Suite Team seat, adding Copilot nearly doubles it.
Employment Hero UK, all per employee per month on top of a £4 base: chat £1, rotas and time £2, core payroll £3, HR and employment law advisory £6, employee assistance £6, managed payroll £12. A £4 seat with advisory and managed payroll is a £22 seat.
Pipedrive: LeadBooster from $32.50, Web Visitors from $41, Smart Docs from $32.50, all per seat. Adding two of those to a $39 Growth seat more than triples it.
Front: Copilot $20 per seat, Smart QA $20 per seat, Smart CSAT $10 per seat.
What it costs a UK business to buy in dollars
Two costs stack, and buyers usually only notice the first.
The card fee. Barclaycard’s Select business charge card carries a 2.99 per cent non-sterling transaction fee. MoneySavingExpert reports TSB, Bank of Scotland, Lloyds and Halifax all applying a 2.99 per cent exchange load. Wise’s guide, fees last checked 7 July 2026, lists HSBC at 2.75 per cent and Santander at 2.95 per cent.
The scheme spread. Smaller. MoneySavingExpert describes the Visa and Mastercard wholesale rates as usually less than a pound worse per £100 exchanged, so well under 1 per cent.
Combined, budget roughly 3 to 4 per cent on top of the advertised dollar price.
A worked example. Five seats of Intercom Advanced at $132 a seat is $660 a month, or $7,920 a year. At a 2.99 per cent card fee plus the scheme spread, that is roughly £240 to £320 a year of pure conversion cost on one tool, before anyone has used a feature.
There is a second effect that is easy to miss. Because the price is set in dollars, your costs rise when sterling weakens even though the vendor never announced an increase. The vendor gets to put your bill up without publishing a price rise.
The VAT trap no vendor mentions
This one genuinely catches out UK businesses near the registration threshold, and not one of the 27 pricing pages mentions it.
When a UK business buys services from a supplier based outside the UK, the reverse charge applies. HMRC’s VAT Notice 741A sets out the conditions at section 5.1 and the mechanism at section 5.2: you credit your VAT account with output tax on the full value of the supply and debit it with the input tax, accounting for the VAT as though you were both supplier and customer.
Section 5.7 is the part that matters most. The value of those supplies must be added to the value of your own taxable supplies when working out whether you should be registered for UK VAT. GOV.UK repeats this on its Register for VAT guidance: taxable turnover includes services you received from businesses in other countries that you had to reverse charge.
The UK VAT registration threshold is £90,000, raised from £85,000 on 1 April 2024. The deregistration threshold rose at the same time from £83,000 to £88,000.
A sole trader with £84,000 of UK sales who also spends £8,000 a year on US-based software is at £92,000 of taxable turnover for the registration test. The software spend, not the sales, took them over the line.
For a business already VAT registered and able to recover input tax in full, the reverse charge is usually cash-neutral, because the entries cancel out. It is not neutral for a business below the threshold, and it is never neutral for the paperwork.
This is general information rather than tax advice. If you are close to the threshold, check with your accountant before you buy.
Roughly half of what you pay for is unused
Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, based on managed software spend across organisations running an average of 305 applications, found that organisations use just 54 per cent of their software licences.
The same research found 79 per cent of IT leaders hit price increases at renewal in the past year, overall software spend rising nearly 8 per cent in a single year, 78 per cent encountering unexpected charges tied to consumption or AI features, and 61 per cent cutting projects because of unplanned software cost increases.
That is enterprise-scale data and a small business will not have 305 applications. The mechanism still applies at any size: per-seat billing charges for access, not for use, and nobody sends you an invoice line for the seats sitting idle.
The market is quietly moving away from per-seat
The 2026 State of B2B SaaS and AI Monetization report, based on a poll of more than 230 software and AI companies in April and May 2026, found hybrid pricing is now the most common model at 37 per cent, up from 25 per cent a year earlier. Pure per-seat pricing persists mainly at the top of the market, at 29 per cent among companies above $150m in annual recurring revenue.
Several vendors now position against the model explicitly. Gorgias states on its own pricing page that its helpdesk is never priced per agent. Crisp prices per workspace rather than per seat. Breathe HR states that its subscription is per business account and not per person. Intercom sells its AI agent at $0.99 per outcome with no seats required.
The honest counterpoint
Usage-based pricing is not automatically cheaper for a small business. It is less predictable. That 78 per cent figure on unexpected consumption and AI charges is the evidence for it.
Per-seat pricing has one real virtue: you can forecast it exactly. Its vice is that it charges for seats nobody uses and rises in steps rather than smoothly. Usage-based pricing inverts both properties. Neither is automatically right, and a business that needs budget certainty more than it needs efficiency should not be talked out of per-seat.
Six things to check before you buy
- Is the price in pounds? Check the symbol, not the web address.
- Does it include VAT? Assume not, and add 20 per cent to your budget.
- Is there a minimum seat count? It can multiply the real entry price several times over.
- Where is the next band? Find the headcount or seat number that changes your bill, and check how close you are to it.
- Which features are per-seat add-ons? The base price is often not the working price.
- If it is priced in dollars, does the spend push you towards the VAT threshold? Reverse-charged services count.
Where this sits in the Whito framework
Buying software is a Build-stage decision. It goes wrong when it is made at the Start stage, as a substitute for a process that does not exist yet.
A CRM does not create a sales process. An HR platform does not create a way of managing people. If the process is not written down anywhere, the software becomes an expensive filing cabinet with a per-seat fee attached, and the band jumps as you hire regardless of whether anyone logs in.
Methodology
We fetched the live pricing page of every vendor named here on 19 August 2026 and recorded only figures that appeared on the vendor’s own page. Where a page rendered its prices through JavaScript and no figure appeared, we recorded that as unverified rather than filling it in from memory or from a third-party review site. That is why Capsule CRM and Zoho CRM appear as findings rather than as prices.
One limitation worth stating. Our fetching runs from outside the UK, so vendors that serve prices by location may show a UK visitor something different. Where a vendor operates a UK domain or a /uk/ path, we used it, and those pages returned genuine sterling. Zoho served an Indian rupee price to us and offers GBP through a selector we could not trigger, so we have not published a Zoho figure.
Percentage increases in the band tables are our arithmetic on the vendors’ published prices, not figures the vendors publish.
Common questions
Do software prices include VAT for UK buyers?
Usually not, and usually the page does not say. Only six of the 27 vendors we checked state VAT treatment on the pricing page. Assume the headline figure is before VAT and add 20 per cent.
Why did my software bill jump when I hired one person?
Because most HR tools price in headcount bands rather than per person. Crossing a band boundary moves your whole account to the next tier. On the tools we checked, the fifth, eleventh, fifteenth, twenty-first and hundred-and-first hires all trigger a jump on at least one popular platform.
Does buying US software affect my UK VAT registration?
Yes. Services bought from suppliers outside the UK are reverse charged, and HMRC’s VAT Notice 741A states at section 5.7 that their value must be added to your own taxable supplies when working out whether you need to register. The threshold is £90,000. Check with your accountant if you are close to it.
How much does it cost to pay for software in dollars?
Roughly 3 to 4 per cent on top of the advertised price. UK card issuers commonly charge a non-sterling transaction fee of 2.75 to 2.99 per cent, and the card scheme conversion rate sits a little under the interbank rate on top of that.
Is per-seat pricing being replaced?
It is shifting rather than disappearing. Hybrid pricing is now the most common model among software companies at 37 per cent, up from 25 per cent a year earlier, while pure per-seat persists mainly among the largest vendors. Usage-based alternatives are less predictable, not automatically cheaper.
Sources
Vendor pricing pages, all read 19 August 2026: Zendesk UK, Intercom, Help Scout, Front, Crisp, Gorgias, CharlieHR, Breathe HR, BrightHR, Employment Hero UK, BambooHR, Personio, HiBob, Salesforce UK, Microsoft Dynamics 365 UK, Pipedrive, HubSpot Sales Hub, monday.com.
Currency and VAT. HMRC VAT Notice 741A. GOV.UK, VAT registration and deregistration thresholds. GOV.UK, Register for VAT. Barclaycard Select business charge card. MoneySavingExpert on exchange loads. Wise on non-sterling transaction fees.
Market data. Growth Unhinged, 2026 State of B2B SaaS and AI Monetization, 230+ companies, April to May 2026. Zylo, 2026 SaaS Management Index.
See also the UK Business Software Price Index, which price-checked 50 tools against their own UK pricing pages, and what dollar-priced software really costs a UK business. If software is part of a wider marketing budget, this is how to judge whether any of it is working.
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