Why we don't charge for admin seats — and why every other field-service platform does

Most field-service platforms charge per-user. The pricing page lists three or four tiers, but the moment you scroll to the fine print you find it: $X per technician, plus $Y per office user, plus $Z if you want a manager who can both dispatch and view reports. We call this the admin tax, and it's a hidden cost that punishes the way real trade businesses actually structure their teams.

The shape of the problem

Imagine a 6-person operation: an owner who quotes, two senior techs who occasionally dispatch, and three junior techs in the field. On most platforms that's 1 admin seat ($75/mo) + 2 manager seats ($65/mo each) + 3 field seats ($45/mo each) = $340/mo. The owner now has a financial incentive to not let the senior techs use the dispatch board, even though letting them is the obvious operational improvement.

Worse, when a junior tech earns the trust to handle a tricky customer call, promoting their seat from “field” to “manager” costs an extra $20/mo. The pricing structure has created a tax on growth.

Why platforms do it

Per-role pricing maps neatly to enterprise sales pitches: “manager seats are more valuable, so we charge more.” It's also easy to model in a sales spreadsheet. The downside — that it warps customers' org structure to fit the pricing — is invisible to the platform.

It also works for them on the upsell. When you finally bite the bullet and let everyone use the dispatch board, your invoice doubles. That looks great on the platform's ARR chart. It looks terrible on yours.

What we did instead

Stelid's Team plan is priced per seat, not per role. A seat is a seat. Mix admins, managers, field workers, however you want, within your seat count.

Same 6-person operation: 6 seats on Team starts at $99/mo (5-pack pricing) and scales to $149 for 10, $249 for 20, $399 for 50. No matter who's doing what, the price is the seat price. Your org chart belongs to you, not to our pricing lever.

What we give up

Less ARR per customer at the high end, probably. A 50-person commercial HVAC company on a per-role plan might be paying $4,000/mo to a competitor — to us, on the same team, $399/mo. We'll need to be honest about which tier of customer that math makes us uncompetitive for, and we are: if you’re running 100+ trucks, an enterprise-tier platform is a better fit.

For everyone else — the 1-50 person trade businesses where the per-role tax actively warps decisions — flat seat pricing is just better.

The bigger principle

Pricing is a product decision, not a finance decision. Every pricing model creates incentives, and most of those incentives are invisible to the platform but very visible to the customer trying to organise their team. We try to pick pricing models whose incentives we'd be happy to live with as customers ourselves.

That's why our pricing is published, every paid plan starts with a real 7-day trial, paid plans say what they cost, and Team is per-seat. No demo gating. No “contact sales for details.” No admin tax. Just the price.