Per-User vs Per-Client Pricing: What Practice Management Software Actually Costs

Software comparisons usually start with a monthly figure and stop there. That is the least useful number available, because it describes your firm on the day you sign rather than your firm over the three or four years you will actually use the system.

What matters is which variable the price is attached to. Attach it to users and the bill moves every time you hire, bring in seasonal help, or give an offshore team member their own login. Attach it to clients and the bill moves when the thing you actually charge for moves.

Neither model is dishonest. They simply behave differently as a firm changes, and the difference compounds.

The obvious cost is growth. A firm that goes from six to ten people pays for four more seats, whether or not the client list grew.

The less obvious cost is the decisions the model encourages. When each login has a price, firms start rationing access. The part-time admin who collects documents does not get a seat. The offshore data-entry team shares one login. The seasonal preparer works out of a spreadsheet and someone copies the results in later.

Each of those workarounds saves a small monthly amount and costs something larger. Shared logins destroy the audit trail, which is exactly what you want when a reviewer asks who did a piece of work. Excluded staff mean the system's record is incomplete, which makes the reporting unreliable, which is usually why firms stop trusting the reporting at all.

Under per-client pricing the bill tracks your book. Add thirty clients and the cost rises predictably. Add three people to service those clients and it does not move.

That aligns with how accounting firms already think. Firms forecast per client, price per client and measure profitability per client. A software line expressed in the same unit drops straight into the model, and you can answer the only question that matters — is this client worth serving — without apportioning a headcount-based subscription.

It also removes the leverage penalty. Firms that build leverage deliberately, with one senior reviewing several juniors, are the firms per-user pricing charges most, despite that structure being the standard way an accounting firm becomes profitable.

Remindoo is $0.90 per client per month on Core and $1.00 on Growth, with unlimited users on both. A firm with 250 clients pays $225 or $250 a month, regardless of whether eight people or eighteen use the system.

To compare fairly against a per-user product, do not compare today's headcount. Take the per-seat figure the vendor publishes, multiply by your realistic peak headcount including seasonal and offshore staff, and compare that against your client count multiplied by the per-client rate. Competitor pricing changes, so check current published pricing directly rather than relying on a figure in any vendor's comparison page, including ours.

Then run the same comparison at the firm you expect to be in three years. That is the number the decision should be made on, because switching practice management systems is a project no firm wants to repeat.

There are cases. A firm with very few staff and a very large book of low-touch clients may find a small number of seats cheaper than a large number of clients. A firm whose client count is inflated by dormant or one-off records may pay for clients it barely serves, although that is usually an argument for cleaning the client list.

The honest test is simple: draw both curves for your firm over three years, with realistic assumptions about staff and clients, and see where they cross. If they never cross in a direction that matters, choose on capability instead, which is the right basis anyway.

Whichever model you land on, these questions separate the published price from what you will actually pay.