Why we price Kevta per workspace and not per seat

Kevta Pro is $10 a month for a workspace. Per workspace, not per user. Three people or thirty, the invoice is the same.

That is a bet with a cost. Here is the argument we had before we made it, including the parts that do not flatter us.

The habit we were trying to remove

The long version is in the quiet cost of per-seat pricing. The short one: per-seat billing is a sound model. The bill scales with the value, anyone can forecast next month, and a vendor can charge a two-person team almost nothing.

What it also does is attach a price to a decision small teams make constantly: should this person be in the tool. The contractor who is here for six weeks. The designer who needs to read one board. The support person who files three bugs a month. Each is a small sum that will never change a hiring decision. Together they produce a habit — rationing access to the system that is supposed to hold the truth about the work.

We could not find a way to keep the per-person axis and remove the habit. So we removed the axis and took the revenue hit on larger teams instead.

Where per-workspace pricing is worse than per user

Three places, stated plainly.

We do not scale down. Per-seat pricing has one virtue we cannot match: it goes to nearly nothing for a very small team. One person on Kevta Pro pays $10, which is what a team of forty pays. If you are one or two people who have outgrown our Free caps, we charge you a whole team's price.

We kept a different axis, and for some people it is the worse one. Pro is bought per workspace, so somebody who needs Pro limits on three separate client workspaces pays $30 a month. On a per-seat tool that person is still one seat: Linear's Basic plan is $10 per user per month billed yearly and covers five teams (linear.app/pricing). We did not abolish the meter, we moved it, and for a consultant it moved somewhere worse.

Our free plan meters people and some of theirs do not. Kevta Free stops at 10 members per workspace. Linear's free plan does not meter members at all — it caps 2 teams and 250 issues instead (linear.app/pricing). On the axis this post is about, that free tier is more principled than ours. The free-plan comparison has the others, including the ones that beat us outright.

Why Pro stops at 50 members

Because a flat price with no ceiling is a promise we cannot fund.

A flat rate charges a five-person team and a five-hundred-person organisation the same for very different load, support and risk. Every flat plan resolves that somehow, and there are two ways.

You can resolve it with price. Basecamp does: their per-user Pro plan is $15 per user billed monthly, and Pro Unlimited is $299 a month billed annually with no per-user fee (basecamp.com/pricing). No seat ceiling at all, which is more honestly flat than ours. The trade is that it is priced for an organisation: dividing one published price by the other, the flat plan only becomes the cheaper of Basecamp's two paid plans somewhere around twenty people.

Or you resolve it with a ceiling, which is what we did. Ten dollars is a price a three-person team does not hold a meeting about, and 50 members is where we stopped.

Fifty is a cap, not a euphemism. It is enforced in code: at 50 the next invite is refused until someone leaves. Anyone who finds out about a ceiling by walking into it has been misled, so we would rather print the number.

What we did not do

There were three other levers. We declined all three, which is why the 50 is load-bearing.

No annual lock-in. Pro is billed monthly and cancels from the workspace's Billing settings. The workspace keeps Pro to the end of the period you paid for, then returns to Free. Dropping back deletes nothing: every board, issue and member stays put, and only creating the next one waits until you are under the cap.

No feature gating. Pro's feature list starts with "Everything in Free" and after that it is only bigger numbers. All four views, custom fields, the GitHub integration, notifications and the MCP server are on the free plan. We never built the version where the thing you came for sits one tier up.

Nothing metered. No usage charges, no storage tier, no paid add-ons.

Any one of those would have let us raise the ceiling or remove it. Keeping all three leaves a single number as the place the arithmetic lands.

What happens if you hit 50

Not much yet, and this is the uncomfortable part. There is no self-serve tier above Pro. The error our API returns at a cap tells a Free workspace to upgrade, and tells a Pro workspace to get in touch with us. An email is a stopgap, not a plan. Kevta is in beta, and pricing is what we are most likely to have got wrong first.

If you want to argue with any of it, the waitlist gets you an early invite, a founding-member price at launch and a direct line to us. The last one is the part we actually want you to use.

Disclosure

We are the vendor, this argues for our own model, and it should be read that way. The numbers being defended: Kevta Free is $0 with 2 workspaces, 5 boards and 10 members per workspace. Pro is $10 per workspace per month and raises those to 10 workspaces, 10 boards and 50 members. Competitor prices were read at the pages linked above and go stale, so check them. Ours live on the pricing page, which is the version that counts if this one has aged.