Project management without per-seat fees

Overview

Per-seat pricing punishes growth. Every new engineer, contractor, designer, or QA stakeholder adds to the bill — so teams ration seats, share logins, or skip inviting the people who need visibility on the plan. The tool meant to coordinate the team becomes a line item you optimize instead of a graph everyone shares.

Ravel charges per workspace, not per person. One subscription covers unlimited team members with core AI planning capabilities — decomposition, dependency graph, GitHub-backed 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 models made sense when PM software was a niche admin tool for a few project managers. Dev-first teams today need everyone on the execution graph — eng, design, QA, ops, and often 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 lock you in before the team size stabilizes.
5. Feature tiers gate AI or automation behind higher per-seat plans — the bill scales with both headcount and capability.

The result: teams under-invite collaborators, maintain shadow spreadsheets for people without seats, or delay adopting 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 execution context — 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 standup. Workspace pricing removes that friction: add the QA lead, the design contractor, and the ops stakeholder without a pricing calculator.

That aligns with how Ravel executes — owners receive 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.