Why we picked per-board pricing instead of per-seat

When we sat down to price EasyBoard, every existing kanban already had a per-seat model. Jira: $7.53/user/month. Trello: $5/user. Linear: $14. Notion: $10 plus another $10 for AI. The per-seat model is so default it feels invisible.

So we put it on the table and asked: who actually wins with per-seat pricing?

Who per-seat helps

Per-seat is a great fit when (a) the buyer is one person (usually a manager), (b) every additional user causes real cost (storage, support, compute), and (c) the team grows slowly.

Most SaaS pretends they meet all three. Almost none do.

Who per-seat hurts

The people we wanted to use EasyBoard:

• Indie founders who occasionally bring in a contractor
• Solo developers running an AI agent as a teammate
• Studios that want their playtesters on the board for two weeks
• Open-source maintainers that want every contributor to see what is happening

Every one of those people gets nickel-and-dimed by per-seat pricing. Adding the AI agent is a seat. Adding the QA tester is a seat. Adding the part-time designer is a seat. The pricing model punishes the exact behaviour we want the product to encourage.

What we did instead

EasyBoard charges per board, billed yearly:

• Free: 1 board, 50 cards, no AI agent
• Solo: $1/board/year, 200 cards, AI agent included
• Team: $12/board/year, 1,000 cards, GitHub linking
• Pro: $50/board/year, unlimited cards, cross-board AI

Add the contractor. Add the agent. Add 30 testers. Add the part-time designer. Pricing does not move.

This is not original. Basecamp charges flat per-team. Cloud storage tools charge per gigabyte. But for project management it is rare, and that gap is exactly the opening we wanted.

The tradeoff

Per-board is great for our audience. It is not great for everyone. If you run a 500-person org with 80 project boards, $12 each, the math gets ugly the other direction. That is fine. Enterprise is not the market we are courting.

If your team is between 2 and 30 people and you want a board that does not punish you for inviting collaborators, this is the model.

What this means for the roadmap

Once price is uncoupled from headcount, the entire product roadmap tilts. We can lean into:

• Multiplayer presence + cosmetics that make the board fun
• Inviting external collaborators without account creation
• AI agents as full participants on the board
• Free tester access for QA workflows

These all become natural product moves instead of "free features the sales team will hate."

Build the pricing model first. The product follows.