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4 min read

Per-Seat Pricing Was Built for Desk Workers. Most of Your Team Isn't One.

by Dexal LLC

Software priced per seat treats a dispatcher who lives in the app and a technician who checks it twice a day as the same cost. For frontline-heavy teams, that math quietly gets ugly. Here's the honest alternative.

Per-Seat Pricing Was Built for Desk Workers. Most of Your Team Isn't One.

Most workplace software is priced the same way: one price, per user, per month. It's simple, and for a company where everyone sits at a desk in the app all day, it's fair enough. But that's not what a field-service company looks like. Or a facilities team, a property manager, a healthcare-admin group, a security firm. In those organizations, a handful of people run the operation from a screen — and most of the team is out doing the actual work, checking the app for a schedule, a message, a task, a document. Per-seat pricing charges both of those people the same. That's the quiet problem.

The math nobody runs until the invoice arrives

Take a 60-person facilities company: an owner, a few office staff and supervisors — call it 8 people who live in the software — and 52 technicians in the field. On a typical chat tool at roughly $8–9 per user per month, connecting everyone costs around $500/month — for messaging alone. Add a task tool at a similar per-seat price and you're near $1,000/month, with most of that spent on seats that get opened for a few minutes a day. So teams do what the pricing pushes them to do:
  • They don't give the field accounts at all. Schedules go out by text message, documents by screenshot, and the "one place for everything" turns back into six.
  • Or they share logins. One "technicians" account for twenty people — no audit trail, no accountability, and a security posture nobody would choose on purpose.
Both defeat the point of having an operations platform. If the field isn't on it, it isn't running your operation — it's running your office.

Price the seat by what the seat does

We think the honest version of per-seat pricing is to admit that not all seats are the same, and bill accordingly. So that's how Dexal is priced:
  • Your plan includes a block of team members in any mix of roles — Core includes 5, Pro includes 10.
  • Beyond that, an admin or manager seat is $12/month — the people running the operation from the console every day.
  • A frontline seat is $4/month — everyone else: the technicians, cleaners, clinicians, guards, and coordinators who need the schedule, the messages, the tasks, and the documents, without living in an admin screen.
That 60-person facilities company on Dexal Pro — 8 admin/manager seats, 52 frontline, with the first 10 members included in the base price — comes to $349/month for the whole platform: messaging, files, tasks, scheduling, directory, and admin, in one app, fully managed. Not $1,000 across two tools that don't talk to each other. (The private AI add-on stays what it's always been: one flat, optional add-on for the organization — never priced per seat, never required to get value.)

Why this isn't a discount — it's the correct price

This isn't "cheap seats." It reflects what each seat actually costs to serve and what it's actually worth. A manager's seat carries dashboards, reporting, broadcasts, and admin controls. A frontline seat carries the essentials, reliably, on a phone. Charging desk-worker prices for field seats was always a mismatch — the software industry just built its pricing before it noticed that most of the workforce doesn't sit at a desk. The practical consequence is the one we care about: at $4 a seat, there's no reason to leave anyone off the system. Everyone gets their own login, their own audit trail, their own place in the directory. The whole org on one platform — which is the entire point. See the full breakdown on our pricing page, or get started — it takes about two minutes, and there's nothing to install or maintain.

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