The Thorbis price is $99 per company per month: unlimited people, every software module we ship, one operating location, and $15 of metered usage included. That is the pricing page. This post is the reasoning behind it, including the parts that cost us.
Per-seat pricing taxes hiring
Most software in this industry is priced per seat, which indexes the vendor's revenue to your headcount. Consider the incentives that creates: every tech you hire triggers a licensing event, and the vendor's growth plan is your org chart.
We think that is backwards for a trade business. Hiring the eighth tech should be a hiring decision, not a procurement negotiation. And a shop should never keep a person off the software to save a seat, because a tech outside the record is a tech whose photos and notes go nowhere. One price for the whole company means the software gets more useful as the crew grows, and the bill does not move.
A per-seat price is a tax on hiring, and hiring is the whole point of a growing shop.
What the meter covers, and why the credit exists
The $99 is the subscription, not the whole invoice, and we say so everywhere the $99 appears. Some things we provide have real per-unit costs: a phone number leases carrier capacity, a connected minute costs money, a payroll run moves through a delivery partner. Hiding those costs inside a higher flat price would make quiet shops subsidize busy ones; metering them at posted rates means you pay for what actually ran.
- A business phone number is $15 a month. One number consumes the entire monthly credit.
- Voice is $0.05 per connected minute; texts are $0.03 per carrier segment.
- Payroll delivery is $8 per worker paid. The payroll software itself is included, because that $8 is the cost of paying someone, not a seat.
- A live published website is $49 a month; a connected fleet device is $20.
- AI runs show an estimated cost before they start, and nothing runs without a confirmation.
The $15 credit exists so a light month rounds to the subscription: a quiet shop with modest phone traffic can live inside it, and a shop that turns nothing on owes exactly $99. Some things are never metered, as policy: people, customers, jobs, estimates, invoices, scheduling, ordinary records, ordinary API calls. Using the board cannot create a charge, because a meter on the core work would be a tax on doing your job.
What we refuse to do
- Quote-to-decode pricing. If the price is not on the page, the price is a negotiation, and negotiations favor whoever runs them daily. That is the vendor, not you.
- Feature tiers. There is no Pro plan holding the useful report hostage. Every module we ship is in the $99. Usage is metered, features are not gated.
- Per-seat anything. People are never a billing unit here, for any module.
- The surprise second month. Rates are posted, usage is visible in real time before it becomes an invoice, and you can set caps.
The honest tradeoffs
This model has costs, and they land on us. A thirty-person company pays the same $99 as a two-person company, so we earn far less per large customer than a per-seat vendor would. The model only works if the product is good enough to win many companies rather than extract more from a few, which is a discipline we chose on purpose, and a real business risk all the same.
It also means being plain that usage carries margin: metered lines are priced above our cost, and that margin plus the subscription is the business. Larger structures pay differently (a second dispatched location is $199 a month, and franchise-scale multi-company runs on an enterprise agreement), but the operating price for one shop is one number, and it is published. One price also takes a sales lever away from us on purpose: there is no discount to dangle in a negotiation, because there is no negotiation.
The test we invite is the one from our own buyer's checklist: sit down tonight and compute your bill from the public page, at the size you plan to be next year. If you cannot, we have failed the standard we ask every other vendor to meet.