Per-Employee Scheduling Pricing Is Costing You More Than You Realize

Most employee scheduling software charges per user per month. The number looks small on a pricing page. $2.50 per employee. $4 per employee. $6 per employee. The problem is that service industry teams are not small. A coffee shop with 12 employees, a restaurant with 25, a retail location with 30: the per-employee rate multiplies fast, and the software itself does not become more powerful as you add employees. You are just paying more for the same functionality.

The math at common team sizes

Here is what per-employee pricing looks like at three typical team sizes, using rates from common scheduling tools in the category:

At $2.50 per employee per month: 15 employees costs $37.50. 20 employees costs $50. 30 employees costs $75. Annually, that is $450, $600, and $900.

At $4 per employee per month: 15 employees costs $60. 20 employees costs $80. 30 employees costs $120. Annually, $720, $960, and $1,440.

At $6 per employee per month: 15 employees costs $90. 20 employees costs $120. 30 employees costs $180. Annually, $1,080, $1,440, and $2,160.

ShiftWiz is $29 per month regardless of team size. Annually that is $348 for a team of 12 or a team of 500. The crossover point where ShiftWiz costs less than the $2.50 per-employee rate is at 12 employees. For the $4 and $6 rates, it is even lower.

What you are not getting for the extra cost

The per-employee pricing model does not unlock additional scheduling capability as your team grows. A tool charging $4 per employee per month does not run a better optimization engine for 30 employees than it does for 10. You are paying more because you have more employees, not because you are getting more.

The other thing that per-employee pricing does is create a perverse incentive: you think twice before adding seasonal staff or new hires to the system because each one increases your bill. Some managers end up keeping employees out of the scheduling software for part of the year to control costs. That defeats most of the value of the tool.

Multi-location makes it worse

Many per-employee tools also add per-location fees on top of per-user fees. If you have two locations with 15 employees each, you are paying for 30 employees plus a second location premium. The pricing compounds in a way that hits growing businesses hardest exactly when they least want to be managing software costs.

ShiftWiz supports multiple locations at the same flat $29 per month. Each location has its own team, scheduling engine, templates, and employee portal. Adding a second location does not add to the bill.

Why I priced it this way

When I was designing ShiftWiz, the per-employee pricing model in this category struck me as backwards. The people most in need of a good scheduling engine are businesses with larger, more complex teams. Those are exactly the businesses that per-employee pricing penalizes the most. A flat rate that does not scale with team size keeps the tool accessible to the operations that benefit most from using it.

$29 per month. That is it. Everything included: all 25 intelligence features, unlimited schedule generation, multi-location support, employee portal, time-off management, shift swaps, and the Chrome extension for Sling and Toast. No tiers. No per-seat add-ons. No billing surprises when you hire three people for the summer rush.