The price is not the bill: the fields that decide what you actually pay
A pricing card answers one question and the invoice answers another. Between them sit the limits, the included allowance, the extra-seat rate, the overage per thousand and the percentage-plus-fixed-fee, and any of those can matter more than the headline. This guide works through the ones our record actually holds, including a ladder where each extra person costs more the more you are already paying, and a plan whose unit price falls as its price rises.
Every pricing page invites a comparison it is not equipped to settle. The card carries a figure per month, and the bill is decided by things printed elsewhere: how many people are included, what happens at the ceiling, what a unit costs beyond the allowance, and whether the charge is a subscription at all. Eighty-two plans in our record carry a limits description and seventy-six describe what is included with them, which makes the constraints better documented on most pages than the annual total is.
Ahrefs is the sharpest illustration, and nothing about it is concealed. Its ladder spans more than elevenfold from the entry tier to the enterprise one, and every tier on it includes exactly one user. Extra people are charged separately, and here is the part that surprises most readers: the extra-seat rate goes up as the plan gets more expensive. An extra user on the middle tier costs half again what one costs on the entry tier, and on the tier above that, exactly twice as much. The top of the ladder does not publish seat terms on the plan card at all, which our record notes in those words rather than leaving blank. So for any team larger than one person, the monthly figure on every rung of that ladder is an underestimate, and the size of the error grows with the tier you choose.
That is worth sitting with, because the intuition it breaks is a reasonable one. Buyers assume volume works in their favour, and on the seat dimension here it runs the other way: the tier aimed at bigger customers charges more per additional head, presumably because those customers are less price-sensitive per seat. Whatever the reason, the arithmetic to do before choosing a tier is headcount times the seat rate for that specific tier, not headcount times a rate you read on a different rung.
The opposite pattern shows up when a price is normalised to the unit it actually buys. Internxt's storage tiers get more expensive as you climb, and cheaper per terabyte: our record derives a price per terabyte for each plan and carries a provenance string beside it recording exactly which two figures were divided. Ranked by headline price the plans run one way; ranked by cost per terabyte they invert, with the dearest plan working out at well under half the entry plan's rate per terabyte. Neither ranking is wrong. They answer different questions, and only one of them is on the card.
Then there are the prices that are not subscriptions at all. A payments provider charges a percentage of each transaction plus a fixed amount per transaction, and both halves are published: PayPal's standard checkout rate is just under three and a half per cent plus a fixed amount on every transaction. The fixed part is the half that decides whether a business model works, because it is invariant to size. On a large transaction it disappears into the percentage; on a small one it can exceed it. A merchant selling something inexpensive is buying a very different product from one selling something dear, at what the page presents as the same rate.
Volume tiers behave in a third way again. Resend's transactional plans include a monthly email allowance and charge per thousand beyond it, which means the plan you want is decided by your sending pattern rather than your budget: a steady volume just under a ceiling and a spiky volume averaging the same amount produce different bills on the same plan. Where a record holds both an included allowance and an overage rate, those two numbers together are the price, and the monthly figure is a deposit against them.
The most consequential non-price field of all is the one that decides whether you may buy a tier. Scribe's cheaper per-seat tier cannot be bought below five seats, which turns its low rate into a floor of five times that rate and reverses the ladder for small teams, as the seat guide works through. A minimum is not a price and does not appear in a price comparison, and it can be the only thing that matters.
The habit worth forming is to find the unit before comparing the number. Ask what one of the thing costs — one seat, one terabyte, one thousand emails, one transaction — and whether the tier includes any of them. Then ask what happens at the ceiling, because that is where a bill stops resembling a subscription. Most of those answers are printed somewhere on the vendor's page. Almost none of them is printed on the card you were meant to compare.
Ahrefs charges more per extra seat the more you pay
Every tier includes one user, and the additional-user rate rises with the tier: an extra person costs half again more on the middle tier than the entry one, and twice as much a rung above. The enterprise tier publishes no seat terms on its card at all. For any team, the headline figure understates the bill by more on the dearer plans.
Normalising to a unit can invert the ladder
Internxt's plans rise in price and fall in cost per terabyte, the dearest working out at well under half the entry plan's rate. Our record derives the per-unit figure and keeps a provenance string naming the two numbers it divided, so a derived rate is never mistaken for a published one.
A transaction fee is two numbers, and the small one matters most
A percentage plus a fixed amount per transaction is one price on the page and two very different products in practice. The fixed component is invariant to order size, so it is negligible on large sales and can dominate on small ones.
An allowance plus an overage is the real price of a volume plan
Where a plan includes a monthly quantity and charges per thousand beyond it, the monthly figure is a deposit rather than a bill. Two businesses with the same average volume and different distributions will pay differently on the same plan.
A minimum decides whether you may buy at all
A per-seat tier with a five-seat minimum has a floor of five times its rate, whatever your headcount. It is not a price, it does not appear in a price comparison, and on at least one ladder in our record it reverses which tier is cheaper for small teams.
Constraints are often better documented than totals
Eighty-two plans carry a limits description and seventy-six describe what is included. Vendors are frequently more forthcoming about the ceiling than about the yearly charge, which means the information needed to predict a bill is on the page even when the bill itself is not.
Questions people actually search
What should I work out before choosing a tier?
Headcount times that tier's own seat rate, plus anything charged per unit beyond an allowance. The common error is taking a seat rate from one rung and applying it to another, which on at least one ladder in our record would understate the cost by half. Where the rate is not published for a tier, that absence is itself the answer to whether the tier is priced for you.
Why do you record limits as prose rather than numbers?
Because that is how vendors print them, and splitting a sentence like a list of projects, keywords and crawl credits into typed fields would mean deciding what each one means. The prose is quoted as read, which keeps it verifiable against the page. It also means those figures cannot be published as prices, which is a real limitation and is why some of the comparisons above are stated as ratios rather than amounts.
Is the cheapest plan per unit the one to buy?
Only if you will use the unit. A plan that is cheapest per terabyte because it includes five of them is not cheap for someone who needs one, and the per-unit ranking exists to answer a different question from the per-month one. The useful move is to compute both and notice when they disagree, because the disagreement is where the tiering logic lives.
How do transaction fees compare with subscriptions?
They are not comparable without an assumption about volume and order size, which is why we do not publish a blended figure. A percentage plus a fixed amount can be cheaper or dearer than a monthly plan depending entirely on how many transactions there are and how big each one is. Both halves of the rate are recorded so the calculation can be done with real inputs rather than a typical case nobody has.
Do you have a commercial relationship with anyone named here?
No. We hold no affiliate relationship with Ahrefs, Internxt, PayPal, Resend or Scribe, and this page carries no affiliate links. Our method, including what makes a figure publishable, is on the method page.
This page deliberately publishes no absolute prices. Every quantity in it is a ratio, a count or a direction computed from dated vendor records read between 2026-08-27 and 2026-09-03, because the fields this guide is about - extra-seat rates, allowances, limits and minimums - are held in our record as prose rather than as resolvable figures, and a price quoted from prose could not be checked against the record at build time. Where a vendor was read in only one market, its figures are not printed here at all, so that this page reads the same in every edition. This page carries no affiliate links and names no vendor we are paid to name. Related: is that price per seat?, how to read a price record and what free actually means. The method →
Found a price that no longer matches the vendor’s page? Tell us — corrections are dated and stay on the page.