The real cost of per-user inventory pricing at scale
Per-user pricing looks cheap on month one. At the three-year mark, it's the single biggest driver of total inventory software cost — here's how to model it honestly.
Every inventory software comparison we see leads with features. Buyers sign the contract on features. Then 18 months later they renew on cost.
The biggest cost surprise in the UK inventory software market is per-user pricing — a model used by Linnworks, Brightpearl, Cin7 (hybrid), and several smaller platforms. On month one it looks competitive. By month thirty-six, for most growing UK sellers, it's the single most expensive line item in their stack.
This post is the honest maths on why.
The model, simplified
Per-user pricing works like this: a base subscription (say £350/month for a starter tier) includes a fixed number of users (often 3). Each additional user is £50–£150/month depending on the platform and plan.
On a small team it feels fine. You have 3 users. You pay £350/month. Done.
Now let's run the growth scenario most UK multi-channel sellers actually hit.
A three-year model for a growing SMB seller
Setup:
- Year 1: 3 users (warehouse lead + 2 customer service)
- Year 2: 5 users (added 1 picker and 1 finance person)
- Year 3: 8 users (added 2 more pickers and a returns handler)
- Order volume: 1,000/mo growing to 5,000/mo over 3 years
With a typical per-user platform at £350/month base (3 users included) + £75/user extra:
| Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Users | 3 | 5 | 8 |
| Extra users | 0 | 2 | 5 |
| Extra-user cost/mo | £0 | £150 | £375 |
| Total monthly | £350 | £500 | £725 |
| Annual cost | £4,200 | £6,000 | £8,700 |
Three-year total: £18,900.
Now the same seller on a per-order platform (MaxInvent Growth at £399/month covering 5,000 orders with 10p/order overage):
| Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly orders | 1,000 | 2,500 | 5,000 |
| Plan | Starter £149 | Starter £149 + overage | Growth £399 |
| Overage | 0 | 1,500 × 10p = £150 | 0 |
| Total monthly | £149 | £299 | £399 |
| Annual cost | £1,788 | £3,588 | £4,788 |
Three-year total: £10,164.
Difference over three years: £8,736 — almost half. And that's before we factor in that the per-user platform is likely to raise prices 5–10% annually, while a per-order platform's cost scales with your actual business growth, not your hiring decisions.
Why per-user pricing doesn't reflect your actual cost to the vendor
Here's the thing: an inventory software vendor's cost to serve you is almost entirely driven by your API calls, your order volume, and your database size. Number of users logging in is the single least expensive variable. It's software — adding a user is measured in pennies per month of infrastructure.
So why do vendors charge per-user? Because:
- It's sticky. Firing 3 users to "save" £225/month is an HR conversation nobody wants. The pricing model locks you in.
- It's opaque to evaluate. Sellers don't know their year-3 headcount, so they can't model the cost.
- It punishes growth. Every hire feels expensive. Some sellers avoid hiring because of it, which is genuinely bad for the business.
The hidden tax of per-user pricing on operational choices
The worst part isn't the absolute cost — it's the behavioural tax. Here are decisions we've seen UK sellers defer or distort because of per-user fees:
- Not hiring a returns handler even though returns were eating warehouse-lead time
- Using a shared login across three warehouse staff (which wrecks audit trails and accountability)
- Outsourcing to a 3PL prematurely because in-house scaling looked expensive
- Keeping a spreadsheet alongside the system for ops where granting the ops team a seat was "too expensive"
The seat cost isn't the whole cost. The decisions made to avoid the seat cost are the real expense.
How to model per-user pricing honestly
If you're evaluating a per-user platform, do this:
- Projected year-3 headcount. Be realistic — multiply year-1 headcount by the growth rate you actually expect.
- Multiply by monthly user fee. Include the base.
- Add 5% annual price increase. Every vendor does this. Build it in.
- Compare to per-order platforms at your projected year-3 order volume. Include overage.
- Add a "behavioural tax" estimate. How much would you pay to remove the friction of adding team members? This is typically 10–20% of the headline subscription.
If the per-user number is within 20% of the per-order number, it's a feature decision. If it's 40%+ higher, pricing alone should decide it.
When per-user is still the right choice
To be fair, per-user can make sense if:
- You're not planning to grow headcount. Stable 3-person team for the next 5 years? Per-user is fine.
- You run a POS operation. Brightpearl's per-user model is actually sensible for retail stores where each till is a seat.
- You have a strong negotiated enterprise discount. Large customers sometimes get flat-rate deals — ask for one.
- The per-user platform has features the per-order options genuinely don't. Rare at the SMB level but possible.
Our position (for the record)
We built MaxInvent with per-order pricing (10p/order overage, no per-user fees) because we think it's the honest way to price inventory software for multi-channel sellers. Our costs scale with your API usage and order volume, so our pricing should too.
That said — per-user platforms aren't evil. Linnworks and Brightpearl are serious platforms and for some sellers they're the right choice. The point of this post isn't to tell you to switch. It's to make sure the maths is in front of you before you renew.
If you want to run the comparison for your own business, our pricing page has a calculator, and our cheapest inventory management guide covers the full UK market by volume tier.