Most pricing advice is written at 5, 15 and 50 seats, because those are the round numbers vendors use on their own pages. Twenty-five sits in the gap, and it is a useful place to look, because it is the first headcount where a team stops being small and the entry tiers that carry a small team stop being available.
Below we price 25 people on the cheapest plan each vendor actually sells at that size, using published annual rates read from the vendor's own pricing page in October 2026. Every figure is either a rate printed on a card or a multiplication of that rate by 25 and by twelve. Where a vendor's cheapest plan has a published ceiling below 25 users, the bill is for the plan that a 25-seat account is forced onto, and we say so in the row.
| Tool and plan | Rate per seat / month | 25 seats, year one | Why this plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| ClickUp — Unlimited | $7 | $2,100 cheapest | No seat minimum, and the free plan is capped by storage rather than by members |
| HubSpot — Sales Hub Starter | $7 promotional, $20 list | $2,100 now, $6,000 at list | Cheapest HubSpot seat, but the $7 is a promotional rate with a $20 list price behind it |
| Todoist — Business | $8 | $2,400 | The shared team workspace is Business only; Pro is a personal licence |
| monday.com — Work Management Basic | $9 | $2,700 | Entry tier, and the 3-seat floor is irrelevant at this size |
| Asana — Starter | $10.99 | $3,297 | Free stops at 2 users; 25 is a multiple of the five-seat step, so nothing is wasted |
| monday.com — CRM Basic | $12 | $3,600 | monday CRM is priced separately from Work Management and starts one rung higher |
| Zoho CRM — Standard | $14 | $4,200 | Free is a 3-user edition, so 25 people is a paid account on the first paid tier |
| Pipedrive — Lite | $14 | $4,200 | No free tier at all; Lite is the entry rung and the rate ties with Zoho |
| Wrike — Business | $25 | $7,500 no choice | Team is published for 2 to 15 users, so 25 seats cannot buy the $10 tier |
Annual rates billed yearly, our arithmetic on the published per-seat rates named in each row, tax excluded, add-ons and one-off fees excluded. Rates read from the vendors' own pricing pages in October 2026: clickup.com/pricing, hubspot.com/pricing/sales, todoist.com/pricing, monday.com/pricing, asana.com/pricing, zoho.com/crm/pricing and pipedrive.com/en/pricing (all checked October 2026; Wrike read from wrike.com/price on October 12, 2026).
Two rows in that table are worth stopping on. The first is HubSpot: the entry seat is genuinely the cheapest in the set today, but it is a promotional figure sitting on top of a $20 list price, and the same page advertises the discount as "Save up to 65%". At 25 seats that is the difference between being the joint-cheapest bill in the market and being the second most expensive.
The second is Wrike. Its $25 rate is not out of line for a mid-market project platform; it is that a 25-seat team has no $10 option, and the reason is written in the plan's own user range rather than in its price.
Wrike's pricing page publishes two self-serve rates and both carry a user range. Team is $10 a user a month and covers 2 to 15 users. Business is $25 and covers 5 to 200. The ranges overlap between 5 and 15, and that overlap is the whole story: below 16 people you can choose, and above 15 the choice is gone.
So a 15-person Wrike account is $1,800 a year on Team, and a 16-person account is already $4,800 on Business at the published rate — before the group size rounds the seat count up. At 25 seats the bill is $7,500. Ten more people, a 67% larger team, multiplies the cost by 4.17 and lifts the effective rate from $120 to $300 a person a year.
| Headcount | Cheapest bill in the set | Wrike | Spread | Wrike's rate per person / year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15 seats | $1,260 (ClickUp Unlimited, $7) | $1,800 (Team, $10) | 1.43x | $120 |
| 25 seats | $2,100 (ClickUp Unlimited, $7) | $7,500 (Business, $25) | 3.57x | $300 |
| 50 seats | $4,200 (ClickUp Unlimited, $7) | $15,000 (Business, $25) | 3.57x | $300 |
Annual bills, our arithmetic on published rates, tax excluded, checked October 2026. The cheapest bill column uses ClickUp Unlimited's annual $7 rate, which is the lowest published seat rate in the set at every one of these three sizes.
The spread between the cheapest and the most expensive entry-level bill is 1.43x at 15 seats. At 25 it is 3.57x, and from there it holds: Wrike is on Business at 25 and stays on Business at 50, so both ends of the range double between those two sizes and the ratio does not move.
That is a general trap rather than a Wrike quirk. Any vendor whose entry plan carries a printed user range has a headcount above which its cheapest published rate cannot be bought, and the size of the jump depends on how far apart the two rates are. Here it is 2.5x per seat, applied to a team that has grown by two thirds. Wrike is also the vendor that pulls its own ladder out of public view twice — a 15-user self-serve wall in the FAQ, and two named tiers with no price — which is the pattern covered in where each vendor's published price stops.
Twenty-five is a friendly number on the seat schedules that vendors publish, and an unfriendly one on two of them.
| Rule | At 25 seats | What it would cost at 21 seats |
|---|---|---|
| Asana's increment of five seats between 6 and 30 users | Exact: 25 is a multiple of five, so every seat is usable | Billed for 25 anyway — four seats, $527.52 a year on Starter, for nobody |
| monday.com's 3-seat floor | Irrelevant: 25 is eight times the floor | Irrelevant |
| Wrike's group of five up to 30 seats | Exact: 25 is a multiple of five | Billed for 25 — four seats at Business, $1,200 a year |
| Wrike's Team ceiling at 15 users | Binding: the $10 rate is gone and Business applies | Binding: same, from 16 people up |
| ClickUp's free plan, capped by storage rather than seats | Irrelevant: paid from the first seat | Irrelevant |
The seat schedules themselves are published, which is why this table can be priced instead of estimated — Asana's incremental steps and Wrike's groups of five are both written in the FAQ sections of their pricing pages. The guide to seat increments and floors works through what those same rules do at 31, 51 and 501 people, where a single person past a boundary costs nine seats.
At 25 seats the floors are quiet and the ceilings are not. That is the shape of the whole band: small teams pay for seats nobody sits in, mid-size teams pay for a tier they did not choose, and the two problems meet in the middle.
The 50-seat break is a different market from this one, because one of the vendors above stops selling at 50 altogether.
| Vendor and plan | 15 seats | 25 seats | 50 seats |
|---|---|---|---|
| ClickUp Unlimited, $7 | $1,260 | $2,100 | $4,200 |
| monday.com Work Management Basic, $9 | $1,620 | $2,700 | Quote only — above 40 users the page states you "can request a quote" |
| Asana Starter, $10.99 | $1,978.20 | $3,297 | $6,594 |
| Zoho CRM Standard, $14 | $2,520 | $4,200 | $8,400 |
| Pipedrive Lite, $14 | $2,520 | $4,200 | $8,400 |
| Wrike Business, $25 | $1,800 on Team, $10 | $7,500 | $15,000 |
Annual bills on published annual rates, our arithmetic, tax excluded, checked October 2026. monday.com's entry tier is not purchasable at 50 seats from the published rates; we print no arithmetic figure for it rather than an estimate.
Every row except monday.com's is the same rate multiplied by a different headcount, so the rises are unremarkable — 25 to 50 seats is exactly double for all five. What is remarkable is that the cheapest bill at 50 seats, ClickUp's $4,200, is the same figure the market's most expensive entry-level bill was at 25 seats two rows up. At 25 the range is $2,100 to $7,500; at 50 the Wrike bill alone is $15,000, and the gap between the cheapest and the dearest entry-level option is still 3.57x, because both ends doubled.
The CRM side of the same 25-seat question is laid out separately in the average cost of a CRM, which covers what a per-seat ladder looks like across five vendors, and the CRM cost calculator prices the same ladders at any seat count on both billing cycles.
One structural advantage of buying at 25 seats rather than 3 is that the per-company add-ons stop dominating the bill. Pipedrive is the clearest case: it prices its add-on layer for the account rather than per seat, starting from Campaigns $13.33, Projects $16, LeadBooster $32.50, Smart Docs $32.50 and Web Visitors $41 a month. All five together are $135.33 a month, $1,623.96 a year, whatever the headcount.
Spread across one seat that is nearly ten times the $168 a year Pipedrive charges for Lite itself. Spread across 25 seats it is 19% of a $8,400 seat bill. Nothing about the add-on changed; the denominator did. The same arithmetic works in reverse for the per-seat add-ons: ClickUp's Brain AI is $9 a user a month, which turns an Unlimited seat from $7 into $16 at any size.
Pipedrive's page also draws the implementation line at a bill size rather than a seat count — the company states that "implementation is free when you sign up for a pricing plan that's over $400 a year", which every headcount in the table above clears. The guide to costs that sit outside the plan card covers the per-company layer in more detail, and the pricing change tracker records which of these rates have moved since we started checking them nightly.
Do not buy 25 seats of a plan whose user range ends below you. If a tier prints a ceiling — Wrike's Team at 15 users is the one in this table — buying it at 25 seats is not possible, and the plan above it is usually priced at a different order of magnitude rather than a few percent more. Check the user range, not the rate, before you assume the cheap tier is available.
Do not treat the promotional entry seat as your budget figure. HubSpot's $7 Sales Hub Starter is a promotion against a $20 list price, and the difference at 25 seats is $3,900 a year. If the plan is going to be in place for more than one contract term, the list price is the number that eventually applies, and a comparison built on the promotional rate is only valid for as long as the promotion runs.
Do not buy 25 seats to stay under a 30-seat boundary if you expect to pass it. Asana and Wrike both round purchases to five seats up to 30, so 26 people is billed as 30 whatever you buy today. If the team will reach 30 within a term, the step is a purchase unit and not a fee, and the seats you buy now are the seats you will be paying for either way.
Do not price add-ons per seat if the vendor prices them per company. Pipedrive's $1,623.96 a year of add-ons is 19% of a 25-seat bill and 966% of a one-seat one. At 25 seats the per-company layer is a small line; the same list at 3 seats is larger than the subscription. The direction of the mistake depends entirely on which way the vendor prices it.
Every rate on this page is quoted from the vendor's own pricing page in October 2026 and named beside the table it appears in; the bills are our arithmetic on those rates and nothing else. Our pricing methodology explains how rates are read, dated and re-checked.
Because Wrike publishes Team for 2 to 15 users and Business for 5 to 200. Fifteen people is the last size that can buy Team at $10 a user a month, which is $1,800 a year; twenty-five people has to buy Business at $25, which is $7,500. Ten more people, a 67% larger team, multiplies the bill by 4.17, and the rate per person rises from $120 to $300 a year without any price on the page changing.
ClickUp, at $2,100 a year on Unlimited's annual rate of $7 a user a month. HubSpot's Sales Hub Starter matches that figure at its promotional $7 rate, but the same plan lists at $20, which is $6,000 for 25 seats. Next are Todoist Business at $2,400, monday.com Work Management Basic at $2,700 and Asana Starter at $3,297.
It is one of the cleanest. Asana sells seats in increments of five between 6 and 30 users, so 25 is a multiple and nothing is wasted, while a team of 21 people is billed for 25 regardless. Twenty-five is also far above every published seat floor here: monday.com starts at 3 seats, Wrike's Team tier at 2, and ClickUp has no minimum, so the floors that inflate a small bill do not bite at this size.
One vendor leaves the table and everyone else doubles. monday.com's pricing FAQ states that signing up more than 40 users means requesting a quote, so there is no published 50-seat figure for it at all. ClickUp goes from $2,100 to $4,200, Asana Starter from $3,297 to $6,594, Zoho CRM and Pipedrive from $4,200 to $8,400, and Wrike Business from $7,500 to $15,000. The spread between the cheapest and dearest entry-level bill stays at 3.57x.
No, they are seat costs only. Some add-on layers are priced per company rather than per seat, which makes them cheap at 25 seats and expensive at one: Pipedrive's five add-ons start from $13.33 to $41 a month each for the whole account, and monday.com itemises 1,000 AI credits at $10 a month on the Basic card and then discounts the same amount back off the total. ClickUp's Brain AI is the opposite shape, at $9 per user a month, which lifts a $7 Unlimited seat to $16.