Blog WorkAuditor Attendance Reports: Setup and Use

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Employee Monitoring Software Pricing: Per-Seat vs Per-Device, and the Four Traps

Two vendors quote $12 and $6 per user per month. One of them costs three times what the other does by the time you finish the contract. This is about reading the pricing page correctly.

The three models you will actually meet

  1. Per seat, per month. The common SaaS model. Simple to read, awkward to budget: hiring a replacement for a departing employee adds cost, and seasonal teams pay for seats that sit unused.
  2. Per device, per month. Each monitored computer is one licence. A shared shift workstation is one licence, not three — which matters in factories, clinics, retail floors and call centres.
  3. Per server. Terminal Server and Citrix host many users on one machine, so licences are counted per server. This is where per-seat pricing quietly becomes per-seat-times-forty.

Four things that make a cheap price expensive

  • Minimum seat counts. A $6 plan with a 10-seat minimum is $60 a month before you have installed anything.
  • Annual-only billing. Fine if you are sure; expensive if the pilot fails. Check whether monthly is offered at all.
  • Server licences counted separately. A remote team on a Terminal Server can double the bill without adding a single employee.
  • Feature gates. Screenshots or file auditing held behind an "enterprise" tier turns a $12 plan into a $29 plan.

The sum that decides it

Annual cost = (computers × per-device annual price) + (servers × per-server annual price) + setup fees

Run it on your actual headcount, not the vendor's example. A 25-computer office with no server, at WorkAuditor's $99.95 per computer per year, is $2,498.75 a year. The same office on a per-seat plan at $12 per user per month is $3,600 — before the seats you cannot use in the summer.

Five questions for any sales call

  1. Is there a minimum number of seats or computers?
  2. Is monthly billing available, or annual only?
  3. How much does a Terminal Server or Citrix host cost, separate from the computers?
  4. Which listed features are not in the tier I am being quoted?
  5. If I remove a computer mid-year, do I get credit?

Related

WorkAuditor pricing (per computer, no minimum, monthly or annual) · what small teams actually need · the 30-minute rollout.

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