Pricing · 20 October 2026
Per-seat pricing looks tidy on a pricing page. On a building site the price grows every time the crew does, including the people who will never open the tool, and it keeps running through the months when almost nothing is happening.
The number vendors lead with is the seat. It sounds small because it is quoted small: one person, one month. Nobody runs a site with one person.
A working crew is a foreman, a site manager, trades coming and going, a quantity surveyor checking in, an owner who wants visibility, and often a client watching progress. Under per-seat pricing, every one of those people is either a paid seat or a person outside the record. Those are the only two options the model offers, and both cost you.
The main daily-reporting apps publish per-user prices from about $15 to $39 a month, several of them billed annually. We checked them in October 2026, and our side-by-side comparison lists each one with its source.
Take a ten-person crew. At the low end, $15 a seat, the bill is $150 a month. At $39 a seat it is $390 a month. That is 15 to 39 times a flat $10 group, for the same ten people, on the same site, producing the same daily record.
Here is the middle of that range, at a representative $29 a seat:
| People on the tool | Per-seat at $29 a month | SiteTab, flat per group |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | $145 a month | $10 a month |
| 10 | $290 a month | $10 a month |
| 20 | $580 a month | $10 a month |
The per-seat column is not a penalty for choosing badly. It is the model working as designed. Your cost is tied to headcount, so it rises at exactly the moment the job gets busier and more people need to be in the record.
One tool in that comparison charges per active project instead of per seat, which is closer to flat pricing. It is still about three times the price per site, and it is still an app every contributor has to install and log into. The pricing is fairer. The behaviour problem stays.
Look at who actually needs to be on a site record. The foreman and the site manager, daily. Everyone else, in bursts. The owner checks in when a decision is needed. The QS appears around valuations and variations. The client looks when they look: sometimes daily for a week, then not for a month.
Per-seat pricing charges the same for all of them. A client who opens the app four times in a month costs the same as the foreman who lives in it. So firms do the obvious thing and stop buying seats for occasional users. The owner gets a screenshot. The QS gets a PDF at the end of the month. The client gets a phone call. The record still exists, but the people who most need to trust it are reading copies of it, late.
Annual billing makes the monthly figure look manageable, but the commitment is twelve months of seats, paid whether they are used or not.
Construction work is not level. There are quiet months between jobs, weeks lost to weather, stages where a skeleton crew holds the site. The seats do not pause with the programme. You keep paying for the full crew through the quiet months, or you cut seats and rebuild the setup when work picks up again.
The deepest problem with per-seat pricing is not on the invoice. It is the decision it forces every time someone new should be added: a subcontractor's supervisor who could post progress photos, a new starter whose work should be logged, a client representative who should see issues as they happen rather than at the month-end meeting.
Each addition carries a price, so each addition gets questioned. Some get refused. The result is a record written by the few people with seats, describing work done by the many people without them. When a dispute arrives, over a delay, a variation or a withheld payment, the record is what you rely on. A thinner record is weaker evidence, and it is thinner because the pricing rewarded keeping people out of it.
Flat pricing removes that decision. When a group costs the same whether five people or twenty-five are in it, nobody has to justify adding a contributor.
To be fair, per-seat pricing is not a trick. For office software it is usually reasonable. A design package or an accounts system has a fixed set of desk users, each working in it all day. The seat maps neatly onto real use, and the headcount barely changes month to month.
A building site is not that. The crew changes with the stage of the work, and contributors are occasional by nature. A pricing model built for stable desk teams fits a site badly, and the misfit shows up as cost first and as a missing record second.
SiteTab is priced the other way. It is a WhatsApp contact you add to the group your crew already uses, so there is nothing to install. Through the day the crew sends the messages, photos and voice notes they would have sent anyway. SiteTab files them and drafts the daily site report, which the project manager reviews before it goes out. The price is $10 per WhatsApp group per month. Flat, with no per-seat charges, and everyone on the crew can be in the group.
See why crews reject another app for the other half of the problem.
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