Most sourcing software is sold per seat. That is fine for a team of one and increasingly wrong for everyone else: the hiring manager who wants to see the shortlist, the coordinator who schedules, the second recruiter who covers a role for a week, all become a licence decision. This article lists which sourcing tools do not charge per seat, what they charge instead, and the trade-offs that the flat price hides. It complements our pricing guide, which covers tiers and negotiation; here we only look at the pricing model.
Four ways a sourcing tool can bill you
Per seat. A licence per named user, usually annual. LinkedIn Recruiter, SeekOut, hireEZ team plans, Juicebox, Loxo and Recruit CRM all work this way. Predictable, and it taxes collaboration: every extra viewer is a line item.
Per credit or per contact. You pay for each email or phone number revealed, or each message sent. Indeed Smart Sourcing (100 contacts a month included, then $5.20 each), Lusha, SignalHire and the InMail allowance inside Recruiter are credit models. Cheap at low volume, unpredictable at high volume, and they create an incentive to under-contact.
Per hire or per role. A fee when someone is placed, or a monthly fee per open role. Wellfound Autopilot ($500 a month per role plus a 10% placement fee) and recruiting marketplaces work this way. It aligns the vendor with your outcome and punishes teams whose roles are many, slow or speculative.
Flat team plan. One price for the organisation, however many people use it. Rare in sourcing, common in ATSs priced by company size (Workable, Ashby Foundations), and the model Noon uses: a single plan with no per-seat, per-credit or per-contact fees, quoted per engagement with no public dollar figure.
Who does not charge per seat
Drawn from the pricing we track on each vendor page, as of this writing. Published numbers are the vendor's; anything marked quoted has no public price.
| Tool | Model | What you pay | Catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Noon | Flat team plan | One plan, unlimited seats, contacts and agents; quoted, no public price | Agent, not a database: you do not get a search UI to browse |
| Dover | Free, then flat | Free ATS and sourcing tools with unlimited users; Premium ATS $199/month | Sourcing depth is limited; the business model is the recruiter marketplace |
| Workable | Flat by company size | $299–$719/month for 1–20 employees, billed annually | An ATS first; the sourcing agent bills separately in AI credits |
| Ashby | Flat by company size | Foundations from $400/month for 1–10 employees | Sourcing is a module of an ATS, not a standalone sourcing tool |
| Wellfound | Per role / per hire | Autopilot $500/month per role plus 10% placement fee; job posts free | Startup roles only; the per-seat Reach tier is the search product |
| Gem | Quote by headcount | Priced on company FTE count, not recruiter seats; Startup Program discounts under 30 employees | Still an annual enterprise contract; headcount growth raises the price |
Everything else in our index is per seat or per credit, including every dedicated sourcing database (SeekOut, hireEZ, Juicebox, Fetcher, SourceWhale, AmazingHiring) and LinkedIn Recruiter itself.
What the flat price hides
Scope. A flat plan is flat for what it covers. Noon's plan covers sourcing, enrichment and outreach agents; it does not include an ATS. Workable's flat plan covers the ATS; the AI sourcing agent is metered. Read the plan boundary before comparing it with a per-seat total.
Quoted means negotiated. Of the flat-plan vendors above, only Dover, Workable and Ashby publish numbers. A quoted flat price is set against your team size and role volume, so it is not independent of seats in the way the label suggests; it is simply not recalculated every time someone logs in.
Utilisation. Per-seat pricing is bad when many people need occasional access. If one recruiter will use the tool all day and nobody else will open it, a per-seat database can be the cheaper option, especially the published self-serve tiers (SeekOut Recruit Core at $149 a month, Juicebox Starter at $99).
Contract shape. Flat plans are almost always annual. Several per-seat tools offer monthly billing, which matters for an agency with seasonal volume or a team that may not exist in six months.
The arithmetic that decides it
Count the people who need to see the tool, not the people who will search in it. For a team of one sourcer, per-seat and flat plans converge and the published self-serve tiers usually win on price. From roughly three users upward, a flat plan at the agentic tier (our estimate for that tier is $1,000–$15,000 a year; see the pricing guide) is frequently below three enterprise seats of any database, and well below three LinkedIn Recruiter seats. The crossover depends entirely on the quote, which is why the first question to a flat-plan vendor is what the price would be at double your headcount.
Questions to ask a flat-plan vendor
- What is included and what is metered: contacts, messages, agents, roles, integrations?
- Does the quote change with company headcount, recruiter count or role volume, and at what thresholds?
- Is there a monthly option or only annual?
- What happens to data and candidates in flight if we do not renew?
- Can hiring managers and coordinators have logins at no cost, and what can they do with them?
For the per-seat and per-credit alternatives and how to negotiate them, see the pricing guide and the LinkedIn Recruiter alternatives breakdown. The vendor pages linked above carry each tool's pricing basis and the date we last checked it.