Almost every SaaS pricing page leads with a small number: two dollars a user, five dollars a user, eight cents a document. The number is real. It is also, for a large share of small businesses, not the number they pay.
Underneath it, in smaller type, sits a minimum. And a minimum does something specific and under-discussed: below a certain size, it makes every customer pay the same, no matter how small they are.
We track the market's published prices in the Ownware Price Observatory — 82 vendors when this was written in August 2026, more since — transcribing each figure verbatim from the vendor's own pricing page with a date. Six of them publish a minimum. Here is where each one bites.
The six, quoted from their own pages
Deputy — a $30 monthly floor
"there is a minimum monthly spend of USD $30 … per month per invoice on our monthly Lite, Core & Pro plans from September 1, 2025"
— deputy.com/pricing (read 2026-07-21, re-read 5 September 2026 — unchanged)
Deputy's entry plan is $5 per user per month. The floor is therefore reached at six users. The full three-year arithmetic for a fifteen-person team is in the Deputy cost breakdown.
| Team size | Per-user arithmetic | Actual invoice | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 people | $15 | $30 | 2× |
| 4 people | $20 | $30 | 1.5× |
| 6 people | $30 | $30 | — |
Vacation Tracker — a EUR 50 floor, and a EUR 100 one above it
"EUR 2 / month — EUR 50 minimum — Billed monthly … EUR 4 / month — EUR 100 minimum"
— vacationtracker.io/pricing (read 2026-07-21; re-read 5 September 2026 — the two floors are unchanged as numerals, but the page now serves them in dollars: "$2 per user / month" with "$50 minimum", and "$4 per user / month" with "$100 minimum")
At $2 per user, the floor is not reached until twenty-five people.
We once reported that the page states its own minimum twice, in two different numbers — and a later read showed the second number was never the page's. On 5 September we quoted a calculator line reading "Total $50 / month ($25 minimum)" beside the "$50 minimum" label (and "($75 minimum)" beside Complete's "$100 minimum"). Read again on 26 September 2026 with a team size entered, the calculator agrees with the label: "Total €50 / month (€50 minimum)" on monthly billing and "Total €550 / year (€550 minimum)" on yearly, for 1 to 25 users. The $25 and $75 are placeholder text in the page's served HTML, replaced as soon as a team size is entered. So the page does not disagree with itself about where the floor sits; our earlier reading did.
| Team size | Per-user arithmetic | Actual invoice | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 people | EUR 10 | EUR 50 | 5× |
| 10 people | EUR 20 | EUR 50 | 2.5× |
| 25 people | EUR 50 | EUR 50 | — |
A five-person company and a twenty-five-person company pay exactly the same for leave tracking.
(The page serves EUR to EU visitors. We quote the currency it served rather than converting at a rate we would have to invent. Read again from outside the EU on 3 September 2026 it served the same two numbers with a dollar sign, which is the same point from the other side: the figure is the vendor's, the symbol is your location's.)
Veryfi — a $500 monthly commitment
"$500+/mo … minimum commitment which buys you [under] 5k docs per month … $0.08 per receipt"
— veryfi.com/pricing (read 2026-07-05, re-read 5 September 2026 — unchanged)
Below the floor there is a free tier: Veryfi processes "up to 100 docs/mo" at no cost (read 5 September 2026), which is the honest answer for a firm handling a handful of receipts — the $500 commitment only begins to matter once you outgrow it. The eight cents is the cheapest document Veryfi handles. The same page prices an invoice at $0.16, a bank check or statement at $0.25, and a W-2 or W-9 at $0.16 (read 5 September 2026) — so a firm whose documents are not receipts reaches the floor on even fewer of them.
This is the steepest floor in the ledger, and the arithmetic is worth doing slowly.
The list rate is $0.08 per receipt. The minimum commitment is $500 per month. So a business processing a genuinely small volume pays:
| Documents per month | At the list rate | Actual invoice | Effective rate | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 200 | $16.00 | $500 | $2.50/doc | 31× |
| 500 | $40.00 | $500 | $1.00/doc | 12.5× |
| 2,000 | $160.00 | $500 | $0.25/doc | 3× |
| 6,250 | $500.00 | $500 | $0.08/doc | — |
A small firm processing two hundred invoices a month pays thirty-one times the advertised per-document price. The eight cents is true. It is also irrelevant to them.
Cheqroom — a minimum with no number attached
"184 Per admin/month" — "We bill annually. Minimum administrator counts apply."
— cheqroom.com/pricing (read 2026-07-05, re-read 3 September 2026 — unchanged; a 5 September re-read was redirected to the vendor's staging host and is not quoted here)
The same page lists two tiers above it, $275 and $367 per admin/month (read 3 September 2026), each carrying the identical undisclosed floor.
Read that twice. The per-admin price is published. The minimum is disclosed. The size of the minimum is not. You cannot calculate what Cheqroom costs from Cheqroom's pricing page — you can only learn that there is a number you have not been shown.
AppFolio — a fifty-unit minimum, and no price at all
*"Minimum spend and 50 unit minimum apply. Contact us for details."**
— appfolio.com/pricing (read 2026-07-21, re-read 5 September 2026 — the sentence is still there, still with no figure, and the two tiers above Core carry the same undisclosed floor: "Minimum spend and units apply.")
AppFolio publishes no price. What it does publish is a threshold: a landlord with fewer than fifty units is not a customer. That is a legitimate business decision, and it is stated more plainly than most — but it means small landlords are structurally excluded before any conversation about money. The 50-unit minimum works through what that gap costs a small landlord.
Veryfi Restaurant Menu OCR — the two stacked
"No public menu-specific price — quote-gated (verified); platform Starter minimum $500+/mo"
— veryfi.com/restaurant-menu-ocr-api (read 2026-09-03)
A quote-gated product sitting on top of a $500 platform floor.
What this pattern actually is
None of these vendors is doing anything improper. Minimums exist for real reasons — support has a fixed cost per account, and a five-dollar customer can be unprofitable to serve.
But note what a minimum does that a per-user price does not:
A per-user price scales with you. A minimum scales against you. Below the threshold, your bill is fixed and your headcount is irrelevant — which means the smaller you are, the worse your deal is. The pricing model that was sold to you as "pay only for what you use" delivers its worst value precisely to the customers most sensitive to price.
And the second effect is subtler: a minimum makes the advertised number unfalsifiable. Nobody quoting "$2 per user" is lying. They are quoting a rate that applies to a company larger than yours.
How to check your own stack in ten minutes
- Open your last invoice for each subscription — the invoice, not the pricing page.
- Divide the total by your user count. That is your real per-user rate.
- Compare it to the advertised rate. If it is higher, you are under a floor.
- Then ask the question that matters: for this tool, at this size, is the floor still worth paying?
For some tools the answer is yes — a $30 minimum on a scheduling system that runs your entire staffing operation is not a scandal. For others it is the moment to notice that you are renting arithmetic.
The alternative, stated without exaggeration
A one-time license has no floor, because it has no meter. You pay once, for unlimited staff, and the number does not change when you hire, when you shrink, or when a vendor introduces a minimum in September.
That is a genuine structural difference and it is the only claim we will make here:
| Deputy | Vacation Tracker | Cheqroom | Veryfi | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Floor | $30/mo | EUR 50/mo | undisclosed | $500/mo |
| Self-hosted equivalent, one-time | Rostera $69 | Leavora $99 | Lendra $59 | Extracta $89 |
Try the Rostera demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
(One-time prices read from each product page, 2026-08-01.)
And the honest counterweight, because a table like that invites overclaiming: owning software means you run it. Backups, PHP updates, and the server being your problem are real costs that do not appear in any column above. A hosted vendor has an operations team; you will not. We think that trade is worth it for a leave tracker and a poor idea for your payment processor — and the line between those two is a judgment only you can make.
The short version
Six of the vendors we tracked in August 2026 publish a minimum charge underneath their headline rate. In every case, the effect is the same: below a certain size, small customers subsidize the pricing page's honesty.
- Deputy's floor bites below 6 users
- Vacation Tracker's below 25 users
- Veryfi's below roughly 6,250 documents a month — where a 200-document business pays 31× the list rate
- Cheqroom discloses a minimum without disclosing its size
- AppFolio requires 50 units before it will quote at all
Check your invoices, not the pricing pages. The pricing page is describing a company larger than yours.
Next steps
- The SaaS Price Observatory — every tracked vendor, quoted verbatim from its own page, dated, CC BY 4.0
- Self-hosted alternatives by category
- Every figure above is reproducible from the dataset at
https://ownware.io/observatory.json
If any price here has changed since the date shown, the vendor's own page is authoritative, not ours.