Ask a founder of a ten-person team what their tooling costs and you rarely get a clean answer. There's a project tool, a time tracker, a docs-and-signature app, maybe a separate OKR tool and a recognition app — each with its own login, its own bill, and its own per-seat price that quietly climbs every time you hire. The real cost isn't any single subscription. It's the tax of running a small company on tools designed for a big one.
BeaconCue was built to remove that tax. This is an honest look at how it compares.
The two hidden costs of the small-team stack
Per-seat pricing punishes the thing you want to do — grow. Most tools charge per user, per month. That model is fine for a 500-person company with a procurement team; for a team under 50 it means your software bill rises every single time you add a person, right when cash is tightest. You end up rationing seats, leaving contractors off the tool, or paying for access people barely use.
Tool sprawl fractures both your budget and your attention. Five tools means five subscriptions, five sets of updates to reconcile, and five places to look when you want to answer one question: what did we get done this week? Every context-switch is a small tax on the scarcest thing a small team has — focus.
BeaconCue's answer: flat price, one place
Flat pricing, for your whole team. No per-seat fees. You pick a tier by team size and everyone's included:
- Free — up to 3 people, to get started.
- Starter — $29/mo (or $23/mo billed annually), up to 10 people.
- Growth — $59/mo (or $47/mo annually), up to 25 people.
- Scale — $99/mo (or $79/mo annually), up to 50 people.
Add your eighth or your twentieth teammate and the price doesn't move. (See the full breakdown on the pricing page — mission-driven orgs also get a discount.)
Everything in one place. Objectives and key results, tickets and a kanban board, sprints and a work queue, time logs and leave, recognition, employee onboarding, releases, GitHub activity, and e-signatures with documents — all in one workspace, one login, one bill.
How it compares
| What you're comparing | Typical PM suites | Point tools (one job each) | BeaconCue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per user, per month | A subscription each | Flat monthly, no per-seat |
| Cost as you hire | Climbs with every seat | Climbs with every tool | Stays flat within your tier |
| OKRs, tickets, sprints | Usually yes | Separate tools | In one place |
| Time, leave, recognition | Add-ons or missing | Separate tools | Included |
| Docs and e-signatures | Rarely | Another subscription | Included |
| Built for teams under 50 | Built for 500+ | Varies | Yes, by design |
To be fair — when the big tools win
The heavyweight suites are genuinely powerful. If you're a 500-person organisation that needs deep customisation, a dedicated admin, and integrations with a dozen enterprise systems, they earn their price. BeaconCue isn't trying to out-feature them. It's making a different bet: that a team under 50 is better served by the essentials, working together, at a price that doesn't punish growth — than by an enterprise platform they'll use 10% of.
The real point: money and focus back on the goal
Every dollar you're not spending on per-seat creep, and every hour you're not spending stitching five tools together, is a dollar and an hour back on the thing you actually started the company to do. That's the whole idea behind one flat price and one place for the work.
If that fits the team you're building, the first five paying teams get lifetime access — claim a Founding seat, or compare the plans first.