The monthly minimum is the price, once your team is small enough
A per-user rate stops being proportional the moment a plan carries a floor. Worked through on a vendor whose page shows two different minimums under two billing toggles, in two currencies two days apart, behind a badge that says ten percent while both the rate and the floor halve.
A per-user price sounds proportional: pay for the people you actually employ, nothing more. It stops being proportional the moment a plan carries a monthly minimum, because a minimum does not scale down with the team. A team of four and a team of twenty-five can land on the exact same invoice, and only the team of twenty-five is buying what the per-user rate advertises. Below a certain headcount, you are not really paying for users. You are paying for the floor, and the floor does not care how many seats sit empty under it.
Vacation Tracker is a clean example, because the vendor's own page states both numbers rather than leaving the floor in a footnote. As our page quotes it, read 2026-09-07: "From about $2 (EUR 2)/user/month with an EUR 50/month minimum; upper tier EUR 4/user with EUR 100 minimum." Read that twice. The headline is the per-user rate. The number that decides what a small team actually pays sits after the semicolon.
What our own re-read settled
We re-read the same page on 2026-09-05, because an earlier note had two different minimums on file and we wanted to know which one was wrong. Neither was. Our own note, verbatim: "Re-read 2026-09-05 and the $25-vs-$50 question is SETTLED: both are real, in different toggle states. Monthly billing shows '$50 minimum' with $2/user; YEARLY shows '$25 minimum' with $1/user. Earlier reads that disagreed were reading different states, not misreading one. Crossover is 25 people either way. Page served USD on 09-05 where it served EUR on 09-03. The badge reads 'Save ~ 10% yearly' while both rate and floor halve."
That last sentence is the one worth sitting with. A badge reading "Save ~ 10% yearly" reads like a modest discount for prepaying a year up front. What is actually happening is that the per-user rate halves, from $2 to $1, and the minimum halves with it, from $50 to $25, at the same time. A single discount percentage is standing in front of two numbers moving together, and the percentage alone tells a buyer almost nothing about what changes for a small team's actual bill. Read the two floors and the two rates yourself before you read the badge.
The arithmetic, labelled as arithmetic
| Toggle state | Per-user rate | Monthly floor | Floor / rate | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry tier, monthly billing | about $2 (EUR 2) | $50 monthly / EUR 50 as first read | 25 people | 2026-09-07 |
| Entry tier, yearly billing | $1 | $25 | 25 people | re-read 2026-09-05 |
| Upper tier, monthly billing | EUR 4 | EUR 100 | 25 people | 2026-09-07 |
The right-hand column is arithmetic, nothing more: divide the floor by the rate, and 25 comes out three separate times, across both billing cycles and both tiers. That is not a coincidence to admire, it is the mechanism to understand. Below 25 people on whichever toggle applies, the bill does not fall below the floor no matter how few of those seats a small team fills. The floor stays fixed while the headcount dividing it keeps shrinking, so the price a team is really paying per person is the floor divided by the people actually on the plan, not the people multiplied by the advertised rate. That effective per-person cost rises the smaller the team gets, for as long as headcount sits under the crossover the vendor's own figures set. Nobody advertises that number. It only appears once you divide the two figures the page already prints.
A currency and a toggle, not just a price
The same page served EUR on 2026-09-03 and USD on 2026-09-05, and the minimum changed with the billing cycle on both visits. That is three variables sitting behind one headline figure: which currency the page happened to serve you, whether you were looking at monthly or yearly billing, and which of the two tiers you were on. A price quoted without naming which of those three states produced it is not a figure, it is a fragment of one. This is a general lesson about reading any pricing page, not a complaint about one vendor -- and it applies to this store's own pages as much as anyone else's. Note the toggle along with the number, every time.
The owned side
Leavora is the self-hosted alternative for this job: staff leave and PTO with accruals, working-day requests, approvals and live balances, for a single one-time price of $99.00, or $229.00 for the extended licence. There is no per-seat rate to divide by anything, no floor, and no toggle to misread, because the number on the page is the only number there is.
Try the Leavora demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
Our own page states the comparison plainly: "2 months of Vacation Tracker equals this one-time price (competitor bills in EUR -- approximate)." That comparison is exactly as approximate as it says it is. It rests on whichever currency and tier the vendor's page happened to be showing when it was read, and it should be treated as a rough two-month equivalence, not a precise exchange calculation.
Stay with Vacation Tracker if this is your job
Leavora is not a like-for-like replacement, and the honest difference is a login. Vacation Tracker's own page states it: "Employees manage their time off independently by accessing quotas, submitting requests, and viewing upcoming leaves and holidays." If every employee needs their own account to check a balance and file a request without going through anyone else, that self-service login is the product being bought, and a per-user rate is a reasonable price for it. Say it plainly: if you need employees to log in themselves, stay with Vacation Tracker.
It is also worth knowing how their price keeps growing past the numbers above. Their own page, read 2026-08-11: "Annual plans are priced in user tiers, so your rate is based on the range your team falls into rather than your exact headcount." A team that grows past a tier boundary does not add a seat or two to the bill, it moves the whole team into the next tier's rate. That is a different shape of pricing again, and it is one more reason to read the actual page rather than carry a number forward from any guide, including this one.
Check the page yourself before you decide
None of the figures above are guaranteed to be the figures on the page today. Prices, floors and badges change, and this one page changed twice inside three days while it was being read for this guide. Before deciding anything, open the vendor's pricing page, pick the billing toggle that will actually be used, monthly or yearly, and read the floor next to the rate rather than the rate alone. Then compare it against Leavora, a one-time price with nothing left to divide. The only product in this catalogue built for a leave-and-PTO job is Leavora, so both links on this page point to the same one, deliberately.