Skip to content

Resources · Press

Why we charge one flat price instead of per seat

Per-seat pricing quietly taxes hiring. Here is the maths for a growing crew, and what we do instead.

Pricing · 20 August 2026 · 4 min read

Most job management tools sold to New Zealand trades charge per user, per month. It sounds fair until you grow.

The maths on a growing crew

At around NZ$52 per user a month, a five person crew is paying roughly NZ$260 before anyone has quoted a job. Take on three more people and you are near NZ$420. Nothing about the software got better. You simply hired.

Onyx One charges one flat price for the plan: NZ$79 a month for up to five people, NZ$149 for up to eight, NZ$299 for up to fifteen, all plus GST. Your fourth or eighth person costs you nothing extra in software.

The quiet cost of per seat

The real damage is not the invoice. It is the decisions the invoice pushes you into: sharing a login, leaving the apprentice off the system, keeping the part-timer on paper. Every one of those puts a hole in your records, and the holes show up when you need the records most, usually in an audit or after an incident.

What we cap instead

Jobs, customers and timesheets are never capped, on any plan. What the plans bound is the cost tail: storage, monthly email and document volume, and AI tool calls. Those are the things that actually cost us money to serve, so those are the things the plan describes.

The trade-off we accept

Flat pricing means we make less from a big customer than a per-seat vendor would. That is the point. We would rather a fifteen person shop pays NZ$299 and stays than squeeze them out at NZ$780. If you outgrow fifteen people, talk to us and we will sort something out.

Be quoting this week.

Start a free trial and be quoting, scheduling and invoicing this week. No card, no sales call, no migration headache.

You create your account on onyx1.app. Fourteen days free, the full Pro feature set, no credit card.