Most B2B SaaS pricing pages are designed to send you to a sales call. We don't want sales calls — we want signups. So we wrote our pricing to do the opposite of what we were told to do. Here's the reasoning.
1. No "contact sales" tier
The default playbook is: three pricing tiers, the most expensive one says "Contact Sales," and that's where the real money lives. Anyone serious gets routed to a 45-minute call where a sales person tries to figure out how much you'll pay.
We hated this every time we shopped for software, so we don't do it. Diamond is our top tier. It has a price. The price is on the page. If you want a custom contract for 500 seats, email us, but you don't need to email us to know what 50 seats costs.
We lose some enterprise revenue this way. We're fine with that — those deals consume disproportionate time, and we'd rather have 100 small companies than 5 big ones at the same revenue.
2. Free plan that is actually useful
Free plan: 10 active jobs, one board, the full feature set. Not a 14-day trial. Not 1 board with no SLAs. The real thing, scaled down.
The reason: most small service teams need to use the tool for two weeks on real work before they can tell if it fits. A 14-day trial is too short for that — you spend the first week getting jobs into the system and the second week wondering if it's working. Then the timer hits zero and you're asked to pay before you have an answer.
With the free plan, you can run a real workflow for as long as you need to decide. When you hit 11 active jobs, you upgrade — at which point you already know it works because you've been using it for a month.
3. No annual-only discount
We tried this initially. It's standard. "Pay annually, save 20%."
We removed it because it punishes the customer who's most uncertain about whether the tool will work. New customers want to pay monthly so they can leave if it doesn't fit. Forcing them into annual to get the "real" price puts a tax on careful decision-makers.
Today, monthly and annual are the same per-month price. We get worse cashflow on it. We think we get better-fit customers in return.
4. Per-board pricing, not per-seat
Per-seat pricing punishes the customer for collaboration. A shop with 4 techs pays 4× as much as a shop with 1 tech for the same workflow. That's the wrong scaling axis — what scales is the volume of jobs, not the number of people looking at them.
QodFlow scales on boards (each board = one workflow, e.g., one shop or one team). Inside a board, all your teammates get access included. A solo founder and a 12-person agency pay the same for the same board because they get the same value from the workflow.
The exception is Diamond (multi-board, large org). That one scales on boards and includes more workflow automation that bigger teams need.
5. No usage-based billing
Tempting because customers feel they only pay for what they use, scary because customers hate variable bills. The boring truth: predictable monthly prices win for tools in our category. We picked predictable.
The ones we got wrong
First attempt: $29 / $79 / $199. The middle tier had nothing distinct about it. Nobody picked it. We made the middle tier worth picking (added SLA automation, removed the seat ceiling) and the conversion to it doubled.
Second attempt: showed dollar amounts only. Customers couldn't reason about value. We added "active jobs included" and "boards included" under each price, and conversions on the page went up — turns out people need a unit they can multiply.
Third attempt: hid the "See pricing" link in the footer. Don't do this. Make pricing one click from anywhere.
What we won't do
Free trial that requires a credit card. Forced annual discounts. Hidden fees. Per-seat pricing. Mandatory demo calls. Quote-only enterprise. Anything that makes pricing harder to figure out than reading a webpage.
The pricing page should answer the question. If it doesn't, that's a bug.