Ask five people what CRM software costs and you will get five numbers, because the question is really three questions. Per seat: what does one user licence cost a month. Per team: what does the invoice read at the seat count you actually have. All in: what is the first-year figure once seat floors, add-ons, required onboarding and tax are counted.
This page answers the first two from the vendors' own pricing pages, for the five products that publish a per-seat rate across three or more tiers: Zoho CRM, Zoho's Bigin, monday CRM, Freshsales and Pipedrive. The third question — the fees that sit outside the seat rate — has its own page: hidden CRM costs, where the same vendors' onboarding fees, per-company add-ons and seat floors are itemised.
| Product | Entry tier | Mid tier | Top tier | Monthly view |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bigin (Zoho) | Express $7 | Premier $12 | Bigin 360 $18 | $9 / $15 / $21 |
| Freshsales | Growth $9 | Pro $39 | Enterprise $59 | $11 / $47 / $71 |
| monday CRM | Basic $12 | Standard $17 | Pro $28 | $18 / $25 / $41 |
| Zoho CRM | Standard $14 | Professional $23 | Enterprise $40 | $20 / $35 / $50 |
| Pipedrive | Lite $14 | Growth $39 | Premium $59 / Ultimate $79 | not printed |
Per seat, per month, billed annually — the cycle each pricing page opens on. Monthly column shows the same tier on the month-to-month cycle. Checked September–October 2026: Zoho CRM and monday from their pricing pages via our snapshot checks, Bigin from bigin.com/pricing.html, Freshsales from the Freshworks pricing page, Pipedrive from its pricing page. Pipedrive's page offers a monthly switch but prints no monthly figure on its plan cards, so the column is left blank rather than estimated.
Two structural facts make the table look tidier than the invoices are. First, the tier count differs: Pipedrive sells four tiers, the others three, so its "top" is really a fourth step at $79. Second, two of the five ladders land on exactly $39 for the mid tier — Freshsales Pro and Pipedrive Growth — which is why a mid-market buyer sees the same headline number from two vendors and a different bill a year later.
| Tier | Published range | Mean | Median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | $7 – $14 | $11.20 | $12 |
| Mid | $12 – $39 | $26.00 | $23 |
| Top published | $18 – $79 | $44.80 | $40 |
Our arithmetic on the fifteen published annual per-seat rates above, per seat per month. Not a vendor figure and not a survey: it is the mean and median of five entry rates, five mid-tier rates and five top-tier rates, and it changes if you add or drop a vendor.
The mean and the median disagree by up to $4.80 a seat a month, and the gap is the story. Four of the five vendors price entry seats between $9 and $14, then fan out at the mid tier, where the two cheapest ladders (Bigin at $12, monday CRM at $17) sit below the median and the two $39 mid tiers sit far above it. A 20-person team choosing the mid tier is therefore choosing between $2,880 and $9,360 a year — not between two similar quotes.
Our mid-tier arithmetic uses Freshsales Pro and Pipedrive Growth as the mid step. Pipedrive's ladder has a fourth tier above both, so a like-for-like comparison against a three-tier vendor is tier two against tier two — the method we also used in the monthly-rate comparison.
Four of the five publish a monthly rate. Comparing each tier's annual rate with its monthly rate shows what the flexibility costs:
| Product & tier | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Extra per seat per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bigin Express | $7 | $9 | +$24 |
| Freshsales Growth | $9 | $11 | +$24 |
| monday CRM Basic | $12 | $18 | +$72 |
| Zoho CRM Standard | $14 | $20 | +$72 |
| Bigin Premier | $12 | $15 | +$36 |
| monday CRM Pro | $28 | $41 | +$156 |
Six tiers, six different penalties, from $24 to $156 a seat a year. None of them is a rounding difference at team scale: the monday CRM Pro gap alone is $3,900 a year at 25 seats. Pipedrive is the outlier in the other direction — its page carries a billing switch that offers "billed monthly or annually", states that annual saves up to 42%, and then prints no monthly figure on any of the four cards. A buyer who needs to know the monthly number has to put a card in the checkout to find out.
| Product & tier | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Bigin Express $7 | $70 | $840 |
| Freshsales Growth $9 | $90 | $1,080 |
| monday CRM Basic $12 | $120 | $1,440 |
| Bigin Premier $12 | $120 | $1,440 |
| Zoho CRM Standard $14 | $140 | $1,680 |
| Pipedrive Lite $14 | $140 | $1,680 |
| monday CRM Standard $17 | $170 | $2,040 |
| Zoho CRM Professional $23 | $230 | $2,760 |
| Freshsales Pro $39 | $390 | $4,680 |
| Pipedrive Growth $39 | $390 | $4,680 |
| Pipedrive Premium $59 | $590 | $7,080 |
| Pipedrive Ultimate $79 | $790 | $9,480 |
The cheapest ten seats on the page cost $840 a year and the dearest published seats cost $9,480 — for the same ten people doing the same job. Notice where the steps are: nothing sits between $2,760 and $4,680, so a team that outgrows Zoho Professional jumps $1,920 a year in one move, and nothing sits between $4,680 and $7,080 either.
| Product & tier | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Bigin Express $7 | $175 | $2,100 |
| Freshsales Growth $9 | $225 | $2,700 |
| monday CRM Basic $12 | $300 | $3,600 |
| Bigin Premier $12 | $300 | $3,600 |
| Zoho CRM Standard $14 | $350 | $4,200 |
| Pipedrive Lite $14 | $350 | $4,200 |
| monday CRM Standard $17 | $425 | $5,100 |
| Zoho CRM Professional $23 | $575 | $6,900 |
| Freshsales Pro $39 | $975 | $11,700 |
| Pipedrive Growth $39 | $975 | $11,700 |
| Pipedrive Premium $59 | $1,475 | $17,700 |
| Pipedrive Ultimate $79 | $1,975 | $23,700 |
At 25 seats the same ladder spans $2,100 to $23,700 — a spread of eleven times, and the number most often quoted as "the cost of CRM" is a mean of those two, which describes nobody. The rule of thumb we apply instead: choose the tier first, then multiply by seats, then check the seat floor and the add-ons.
| Product | $0 tier | Trial | Smallest paid purchase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoho CRM | Free, forever, for 3 users | 15 days | 1 seat |
| Bigin | Free: 1 user, 500 records | 15 days | 1 seat |
| monday CRM | None on the CRM ladder | 14 days (Pro) | 3 seats |
| Freshsales | None | 21 days | 1 seat |
| Pipedrive | None | 14 days | 1 seat |
Checked September–October 2026. Zoho CRM's free edition is capped at 3 users, 5,000 API calls a day and 10 exports; Bigin's free tier is one user on a single pipeline with 500 records; monday's free plan covers 2 seats on Work Management, and the CRM, service and dev cards open on a 3-seat selector.
The free tier is the cheapest line on this page and the shortest: three free Zoho CRM users means the fourth user starts a bill, and at Standard the fourth seat costs $56 a month billed annually, or $672 a year, for a team that has been paying nothing.
One tier step inside a single vendor. Zoho CRM Standard to Professional is +$9 a seat, or +$2,700 a year at 25 seats. Freshsales Growth to Pro is +$30 a seat, or +$9,000 a year at 25 seats. Both steps are larger than the entire annual bill of the cheapest ladder in this table.
Seat floors and seat blocks. monday CRM's paid tiers start at three seats, so its $12 rate is a $36-a-month floor. Vendors that sell seats in blocks behave the same way at larger sizes: a team of 31 people buying 40 seats pays for nine it cannot assign.
Add-ons priced per company, not per seat. Pipedrive publishes five add-ons starting at $13.33 (Campaigns), $16 (Projects), $32.50 (LeadBooster), $32.50 (Smart Docs) and $41 (Web Visitors) per company a month. Taken together that is $135.33 a month, or $1,623.96 a year, against a 5-seat Lite bill of $840 a year. The seat rate is the smallest number on the invoice.
The billing cycle. $24 to $156 a seat a year, measured above. It is the one lever a buyer controls before signing anything.
Teams whose pipeline needs automation. The entry tiers are priced for record-keeping. Bigin Express at $7 carries 500 records and a single pipeline; the moment a second pipeline or a record ceiling matters you are buying Premier at $12, not Express at $7, and the "cheapest CRM" comparison you read collapses.
Teams of two or three. A three-person team that fits Zoho CRM's free edition pays $0, and a four-person team pays $672 a year at Standard. Below roughly five seats the tier decision costs more than the seat count does, and the CRM cost calculator is the faster way to see it than a spreadsheet.
Anyone who needs the vendor to sign something. Published per-seat rates are self-serve prices. Above a threshold — monday routes more than 40 seats to a quote, Pipedrive waives implementation above a $400-a-year plan — the list price stops being the price. Our costed alternative shortlists, such as the small-team CRM comparison, apply the same rates at named seat counts so the numbers stay comparable.
On the five per-seat ladders we check, entry tiers run from $7 a seat a month (Bigin Express) to $14 (Zoho CRM Standard and Pipedrive Lite) billed annually — $84 to $168 a seat a year. Top published tiers run $18 to $79 a seat a month, or $216 to $948 a year. Zoho CRM includes a free edition for three users and Bigin a free tier for one user with 500 records; Freshsales and Pipedrive have no free tier. Prices checked October 2026.
Averaging the published annual per-seat rates we track: entry tiers $11.20 mean / $12 median, mid tiers $26.00 / $23, and top tiers $44.80 / $40 a seat a month. That is our arithmetic across five ladders, not a vendor figure. The mix matters as much as the average — two of the five mid tiers sit at $39 while the cheapest sits at $12.
The fifteen published paid tiers across the five ladders span $7 to $79 a seat a month, a factor of eleven, and the bill also depends on seat count, billing cycle and which tier you land on. At 25 seats the annual bill ranges from $2,100 on Bigin Express to $23,700 on Pipedrive Ultimate, both on rates the vendors print themselves.
Where a monthly rate is published the premium runs from $24 to $156 a seat a year on the same tier: $24 on Bigin Express and Freshsales Growth, $72 on Zoho CRM Standard and monday CRM Basic, $156 on monday CRM Pro. Pipedrive's cards print no monthly rate at all, even though its billing switch offers the option. The same figures decide what a switch between two of these ladders costs, because the license you leave keeps billing while the new one starts — the three-bill arithmetic behind a CRM migration works it out at twenty-five seats.
On published annual rates: $2,100 (Bigin Express), $2,700 (Freshsales Growth), $3,600 (monday CRM Basic or Bigin Premier), $4,200 (Zoho CRM Standard or Pipedrive Lite), $5,100 (monday CRM Standard) and $6,900 (Zoho CRM Professional) a year. The dearest published combination is Pipedrive Ultimate at $23,700.
If the seat rate above is only one line of the decision, the rest of it is on the same method: the hidden costs of CRM itemises required onboarding fees, per-company add-ons and seat floors for six vendors, and the monthly-rate comparison sorts the same vendors by which of them print their month-to-month price at all.