Every legacy applicant tracking system charges more as your team grows. Not a little more. A lot more. And the fee is usually hidden in the fine print of a sales quote, not on the pricing page.
Greenhouse: $240 per seat per year. Ashby: $120. Workable: $99. Manatal: $15 per user per month, which looks cheap until you multiply it out. A 50-person team pays $9,750 to $24,000 in seat fees alone. Zero of that goes to features you don’t already have.
Why per-seat pricing punishes the thing you want most
Hiring gets better when more of your team participates. The engineering lead reads the candidate. The CEO chimes in on a borderline hire. The interviewers leave notes directly on the profile. Decisions move faster and information doesn’t get lost in email threads.
Per-seat pricing makes this expensive. On a legacy ATS, adding your tech lead, your CEO, and four interviewers to a single hiring loop costs $500 to $1,500 per year extra. The rational response is to lock down access. Only HR logs in. Hiring managers ask over Slack. Decisions slow down. The ATS stops being a collaboration tool and becomes a gatekeeper.
Gatekeeping isn’t just a UX problem. It degrades the quality of your hires. When only HR can read candidates, hiring managers never see the full picture, and decisions get made with incomplete information.
The math gets worse as you grow
This is the part that kills startups. Per-seat pricing compounds with team size, so the years when you grow fastest are the years your ATS bill grows fastest. The moment you hit Workable’s 21-employee threshold, your bill jumps 67% in some tiers. Greenhouse renews every year at 8 to 15% above the previous year. A $24,000 bill in year one becomes $28,000 in year two, then $32,000 in year three.
None of that is because you got more value from the tool. It’s because you grew, and the vendor priced a tax on growth.
Curriculo’s flat-rate model
CurriculoATS charges one price regardless of team size. Every plan — Free, Pro, Enterprise — includes unlimited team members.
Starter: free forever. 1 active job. Unlimited team members. Every feature. AI scoring with written reasoning, hiring pipelines, Gmail-style inbox, interview scheduling, Slack, Google Workspace SSO, branded careers portal, analytics, email-based apply. No credit card.
Pro: $100/month flat. Currently $50/month during early bird. Unlimited active jobs. Unlimited team members. Priority support. Same features as Starter, just unlimited jobs.
Enterprise: custom. Everything in Pro plus Full API access (Enterprise only), SSO/SAML, custom integrations, dedicated account manager, SLA. Still zero per-seat fees.
Flat-rate isn’t a promotion. It’s a structural choice. We built CurriculoATS to stop the growth tax, so the bill you pay today is the bill you’ll still be paying at 10x your current headcount.
The real cost comparison at 50 people
Per-seat fees stack on top of the base price. Most people don’t see the full picture until they renew.
| Platform | Base | Per-seat (50) | Total/yr |
|---|---|---|---|
| Greenhouse | $12,000 | $12,000 | $24,000+ |
| Ashby | $6,000 | $6,000 | $12,000 |
| Workable | $4,800 | $4,950 | $9,750+ |
| CurriculoATS Pro | $1,200 | $0 | $1,200 |
| CurriculoATS Pro (early bird) | $600 | $0 | $600 |
Compared to Workable, the cheapest legacy option, Curriculo Pro is 8x cheaper at regular price and 16x cheaper during early bird. Compared to Greenhouse, it’s 20x to 40x cheaper. That ratio isn’t a negotiation. It’s structural.
The early bird window
Pro is $50/month during our early bird period, before it moves to $100/month. No contracts. No cancellation fees. If you sign up during early bird, you lock in that rate until you cancel.
Start with the free plan if you want to see outcome-based AI in action before paying anything. Or compare against specific vendors: vs Greenhouse, vs Ashby, vs Workable, vs Lever.