Stop Paying Per Person to Write a Rota — The Honest Deputy Cost Breakdown (2026)
Deputy charges $5–$9 per user per month to schedule shifts. We did the 3-year math for a 15-person team from Deputy's own published prices, and we say plainly where Deputy still wins.
There is a moment most shift managers hit somewhere around the second year.
You open the invoice, and the number has quietly become real money. Not catastrophic — nobody cancels a scheduling tool over $97 a month — but real. And the thing it buys you, when you strip away the dashboards, is a grid that says who is working on Thursday.
This is a cost breakdown of that grid. Every price below comes from the vendor's own published pricing page, read on 1 August 2026 and linked so you can check it. Where the honest answer favours Deputy, we say so — there is a whole section of this article devoted to it, and you should read that section before you do anything.
What Deputy actually costs
From Deputy's own pricing page (read 2026-08-01):
| Plan | Published price |
|---|---|
| Lite | $5 per user per month (USD excl. all applicable taxes) |
| Core | $6.50 per user per month (USD excl. all applicable taxes) |
| Pro | $9 per user per month (USD excl. all applicable taxes) |
All three are described as "billed upfront or in monthly installments."
There are also four add-ons, each priced separately on the same page:
| Add-on | Published price |
|---|---|
| HR | $2 USD per user per month, billed monthly |
| Messaging+ | $1.95 USD per user per month, billed monthly |
| Analytics+ | $1.50 USD per user per month, billed monthly |
| Payroll (enabled by Paycor) | $8 USD per user per month + $49 monthly base fee |
And one line that deserves more attention than it usually gets:
"There is a minimum monthly spend of USD $30/AUD $30/GBP £20 per month per invoice on our monthly Lite, Core & Pro plans from September 1, 2025."
(Source: deputy.com/pricing, read 2026-08-01.)
The minimum spend is the part small teams miss
Work it through. On Lite at $5 per user per month, the $30 minimum is reached at exactly six users. Below six, you do not pay six times five — you pay the minimum.
A five-person coffee shop's arithmetic says $25 a month. The invoice says $30. A four-person clinic's arithmetic says $20. The invoice says $30 — a 50% premium over the advertised per-seat price, entirely because of a floor most people never read.
This is not a scandal. Minimums are ordinary and Deputy publishes theirs openly, which is more than many vendors do. But if you are a very small team who chose a per-seat tool because you are small, the per-seat logic stops applying to you before you even start.
The 3-year math for a 15-person rota
Fifteen people is a typical single-site café, salon, small clinic, or retail floor. Here is what the published prices produce over 36 months, using nothing but multiplication:
| Deputy plan | Monthly (15 users) | 12 months | 36 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lite ($5) | $75.00 | $900 | $2,700 |
| Core ($6.50) | $97.50 | $1,170 | $3,510 |
| Pro ($9) | $135.00 | $1,620 | $4,860 |
| Core + HR add-on ($8.50) | $127.50 | $1,530 | $4,590 |
Every figure derives from the published per-user prices above. No discounts, promotions or annual-prepay reductions are modelled, because none are published as specific figures on that page — if Deputy offers you a better annual rate, that is a real saving and you should take it into account.
Three observations about this table.
First, the number grows with your success. Hire five more people and the 36-month Core figure moves from $3,510 to $4,680. The rota did not get harder to write. You simply have more names in it, and the pricing model charges per name.
Second, the add-ons are per-user too. The HR add-on looks like $2. On fifteen people over three years it is $1,080 — more than most people expect a "$2 add-on" to cost.
Third, none of this is a criticism of Deputy's value. It is a description of a model. Per-seat SaaS is a rental. Rentals are entirely reasonable, and they never stop.
What the alternative costs
Rostera is a self-hosted staff shift scheduler: PHP and MySQL, installed on your own hosting, bought once.
From its product page (read 2026-08-01): $59.00 for a single-site licence, described as "one-time, yours forever," with "instant download · licence key included."
The technical facts, quoted from the same page: a "2-minute web installer, plain PHP 8 + MySQL (or SQLite for a trial), no Composer or build step — Docker image included." On the database question it says: "Either — SQLite for a zero-config trial, MySQL/MariaDB for production on ordinary shared hosting."
So the comparison, for a 15-person team over three years:
| 36-month cost | |
|---|---|
| Deputy Lite | $2,700 |
| Deputy Core | $3,510 |
| Deputy Pro | $4,860 |
| Rostera single licence | $59 + your hosting |
On Deputy Core, a 15-person team spends the price of a Rostera licence in about eighteen days.
The honest part: what self-hosting actually costs you
A comparison that stops at the licence fee is a sales pitch, not a cost breakdown. Self-hosting has three real costs, and two of them are not money.
Hosting. Rostera runs on ordinary shared hosting — plain PHP 8 and MySQL, with no Composer step and no build pipeline (product page, read 2026-08-01). If your business already runs a website — and most 15-person businesses do — the marginal cost of adding a PHP app to that hosting is frequently zero, because you are already paying for the server. If you have no hosting at all, you will need some, and you should price that from an actual host rather than take a number from an article. For a concrete number from a named provider: Hetzner's own pricing — machine-read from the price API behind their pricing pages on 10 Aug 2026 — lists web-hosting plans from €1.60 to €16.72 a month and entry cloud servers from €3.99 a month (prices as returned for their German datacenters; confirm current pricing and VAT treatment at checkout). Any comparable host works — the point is that the "own" side of this comparison costs single-digit euros a month.
We are deliberately not putting an invented hosting figure in this table. What we will say is this: the gap between $59 and $3,510 is large enough that no realistic hosting bill closes it. That is the honest form of the argument, and it does not need a number we cannot source.
Your time, at install. A two-minute installer is a two-minute installer only if you have somewhere to put it and know how to upload files. Budget an hour the first time, including reading. If uploading files by FTP or clicking through a hosting control panel sounds like somebody else's job, that hour may be two — or it may be a favour you ask of the person who built your website.
Your time, forever. This is the cost nobody puts in the comparison table, and it is the one that actually decides the question. When Deputy has a problem, Deputy fixes it while you sleep. When your server has a problem, you fix it. Backups are yours. PHP upgrades are yours. If the machine falls over on a Friday night and the rota is on it, that is your Friday night.
Some people read that paragraph and think fine, I already run a website, this is nothing. Others read it and think absolutely not. Both are correct answers, about different businesses. Anyone who tells you self-hosting is free is selling you something, and so is anyone who tells you it is hard.
Where Deputy is genuinely better
This section exists because a comparison without it cannot be trusted.
Deputy does things Rostera explicitly does not do. Rostera's own FAQ is unusually blunt about this, and we are quoting it rather than paraphrasing:
"Is Rostera payroll?" — "No. It plans shifts — who works, when, and for how long. It holds no pay rates or wages, calculates no pay, and moves no money. Zero payment surface, by design."
"Is it a time clock?" — "No. Shifts are planned hours, not clock-in / attendance records — there is no time or biometric capture. It is a scheduling and planning tool."
(Source: ownware.io/p/rostera, read 2026-08-01.)
Deputy, meanwhile, publishes paid modules for exactly those jobs — a Payroll add-on and an HR add-on, both listed on its pricing page. If you need the plan, the clock and the pay run to be one system, Deputy is a better fit and this article is not for you. That is not a grudging concession; it is the main reason to stay.
Three more honest points in Deputy's favour:
- A hosted tool has no bad night. Somebody else is on call. For a business where the rota failing is a genuine operational emergency, paying a monthly fee to make it somebody else's emergency is a rational purchase.
- Mobile and staff-facing polish costs real money to build, and a rented product amortises it across every customer. A one-time PHP app will not match a funded product's app-store experience, and you should assume it does not.
- Compliance and labour-rule features are jurisdiction-specific and expensive to maintain. If your scheduling is constrained by award interpretation or complex overtime rules, verify feature-by-feature against your own requirements before switching anything — your jurisdiction's rules against both products' current feature lists, not against this article.
Where the self-hosted option genuinely wins
Cost, obviously — but the shape matters more than the size. A one-time licence is a cost that ends. A per-seat subscription is a cost that grows with your headcount, indefinitely. Over ten years the difference stops being a discount and becomes a different category of expense.
The pricing model stops punishing growth. Hiring is a good thing. Under per-seat pricing, every good thing has a line item.
Your data is in a database you can open. Rostera's FAQ addresses the vendor-risk question directly: "You get the full PHP source and your rota lives in one database you own — nothing phones home, nothing expires." (Product page, read 2026-08-01.) For anyone who has lived through a supplier being acquired and re-priced, that sentence is worth something on its own.
Precision, if you care about it. The same FAQ states hours are "Exact to the minute. Times are stored as integer minutes and summed in PHP, with DST-correct shift lengths — the shipped 130-assertion suite covers overnight shifts and both DST transitions." Anyone who has had a rota tool quietly lose or gain an hour on a clock-change weekend knows why that is called out.
The switch path, honestly
1. Try it before you decide anything. The Rostera demo opens already signed in on sample data, with no sign-up and no password, and it resets itself, so you can click anything. Fifteen minutes there will tell you more than the rest of this article. If the grid does not feel right, stop — you have lost a quarter of an hour and saved yourself a migration.
2. Export your existing schedule and staff list. You want names, contact details, and enough of the current rota to rebuild the coming fortnight. Deputy's own help documentation lists its current export options — read it before you give notice, while your account still exports.
3. Install on hosting you already have. Plain PHP 8 and MySQL, no build step, Docker image included if you prefer that route. SQLite works for a zero-config trial before you commit a production database.
4. Run both for two weeks. Build next fortnight's rota in both systems in parallel. This is the step people skip and then regret. It costs you one duplicated fortnight and it is the only way to find out what you actually use.
5. Cancel only after a full cycle has run clean. Not after the install — after a real published rota, with real shift swaps and a real payroll week downstream of it.
If you have a time clock or payroll wired into Deputy, step 5 is where you stop and reconsider, because unpicking those is a bigger project than replacing a scheduling grid.
The short version
If you need scheduling plus attendance capture plus payroll in one system, Deputy is the better product and the subscription is what that integration costs. Stay.
If what you actually need is a rota — who works, when, for how long, published to your team without paying per person for the privilege — then a 15-person team is looking at somewhere between $2,700 and $4,860 over three years for a grid, against a one-time licence and hosting you may already be paying for.
Try the demo before you decide. It is ungated, it is real, and it will settle the question faster than any comparison table.
Next steps
- Open the live Rostera demo — no sign-up, already signed in, resets itself
- Rostera product page and licence options
- Deputy alternatives — the self-hosted comparison
Every price in this article is quoted from the vendor's own published pricing page and dated. If a price has changed since 1 August 2026, the vendor's page is authoritative, not ours.