Project management without per-seat fees

Overview

Per-seat pricing penalizes growth. Every new engineer, contractor, designer, or QA stakeholder adds to the bill, so teams limit seats or leave out people who need visibility. The planning tool becomes a cost to manage instead of a map everyone can see.

Ravel charges per workspace, not per person. One subscription includes unlimited team members, AI project breakdowns, dependency maps, GitHub-based progress, and owner email notifications. See our Pricing page for the current plan, 14-day trial, and refund terms.

The per-seat growth tax

Per-seat pricing came from an era when project management tools served a small group of project managers. Modern dev teams need everyone in the plan: engineering, design, QA, ops, and contractors rotating through a launch.

1. You hire two engineers. The bill goes up by two seats.
2. You add a QA contractor for six weeks. Another seat, or they work blind off Slack screenshots.
3. Design and ops need read access for handoffs. Finance asks if view-only seats are worth it.
4. Annual contracts offer discounts. But they lock you in before the team size stabilizes.
5. Higher tiers often gate AI or automation, so the bill grows with both headcount and the features you need.

Teams end up under-inviting collaborators, maintaining shadow spreadsheets for people without seats, or putting off a PM tool until "we're big enough to afford it." Planning quality suffers either way.

Per-seat vs workspace

What the workspace includes

The Ravel workspace is one paid subscription for your entire team. All members share the same projects, dependency graphs, and plan without counting seats at invite time.

Who benefits most

Flat workspace pricing helps any team that would otherwise ration seats. These patterns see the strongest return:

1. Growing dev teams (5–50 engineers), hiring should not trigger a PM invoice review.
2. Startups with contractors, rotating specialists join the graph for one launch without seat negotiations.
3. Cross-functional launches, design, QA, and ops need the same dependency view as eng.
4. Agencies and consultancies, client collaborators and bench engineers come and go; the workspace stays one price.
5. Founders wearing the PM hat, invite everyone who blocks or unblocks work, not just who fits the seat budget.

Invite the whole team to the graph

Dependency-aware planning only works when the people who own tasks and blockers can see the graph. Per-seat pricing creates an incentive to keep the plan in one person's head and broadcast updates in team check-ins. Workspace pricing removes that friction: add the QA lead, the design contractor, and the ops stakeholder without a pricing calculator.

Ravel notifies owners by email when tasks unlock, complete, slip, or hit risk. More owners on the workspace means fewer "I didn't know that was blocked" surprises, not a higher bill.