Why We Chose Flat-Rate Pricing: The Thicket Story

Before we wrote a single line of code for Thicket, we had a spreadsheet. It listed every project management tool we'd used as a team, what we paid, and how the bill changed every time someone joined or left. The numbers told a story we couldn't ignore.

This post isn't a sales pitch. It's the actual reasoning behind our pricing decision. We chose flat-rate because the math demanded it, because the incentives made sense, and because someone already proved it works at massive scale.

The Spreadsheet That Started Everything

We sat down and calculated what four popular project management tools actually cost at different team sizes. Not the "starting at" price on the marketing page. The real annual cost, using the cheaper annual billing option.

Look at that last row. A 50-person team on Monday.com pays over 12x what they'd pay on Thicket. Even ClickUp, the most affordable per-user option, costs 7x more at that size.

The gap doesn't shrink as you grow. It widens. Every new hire is another $7 to $12 per month on someone else's tool. On ours, it's zero.

For the full breakdown across nine tools including Wrike, Jira, and Teamwork, see our 2026 pricing comparison.

Per-User Pricing Misaligns Everyone's Incentives

Here's what bothered us most about per-user pricing: the vendor makes more money when you add people, but your costs go up for the same product. Nothing changes on their end. Same servers, same code, same support load (roughly). But your bill climbs linearly.

This creates a specific kind of organizational damage. Teams start gatekeeping access. The project manager gets a seat. The designer gets a seat. But the copywriter? The client? The contractor who's here for three weeks? Those people get left out because someone did the mental math and decided $12/mo wasn't worth it for "occasional" access.

And then the workarounds begin. Screenshots of task boards in Slack. Status updates relayed secondhand. Clients emailing to ask "what's the latest?" because they can't just log in and see for themselves.

The whole point of project management software is to keep everyone on the same page. Per-user pricing creates a financial incentive to keep people off the page.

We wanted the opposite. We wanted teams to add everyone without thinking twice. The intern who's here for the summer. The freelance developer on a two-week contract. The client who just wants to watch progress. All of them should be in the tool, because that's when the tool actually works.

Basecamp Already Proved This Works

We didn't invent flat-rate SaaS pricing. Basecamp did, and they proved it at a scale that should have convinced the entire industry.

Basecamp has generated over $100M in revenue. They've served over 3.7 million accounts. They've been profitable for over two decades. And they did it all with flat pricing, a small team, and zero venture capital.

DHH and Jason Fried built a company that prints money without charging per seat. The model works. It's not theoretical.

So why didn't everyone follow? Partly because VCs don't like flat-rate models. Per-user pricing gives you "net revenue retention" above 100% as customers grow, which looks great on a fundraising deck. Flat-rate doesn't give you that automatic expansion revenue. You have to earn growth by getting new customers, not by taxing existing ones.

We think that's healthier. It means we stay focused on making the product good enough that new people want to sign up, rather than optimizing ways to extract more from people who already did. For a deeper look at how flat-rate compares across the market, check our flat-rate project management breakdown.

What Thicket Adds to the Flat-Rate Playbook

Basecamp charges $299/mo. That's reasonable for a 50-person company, but it's steep for a 6-person startup or a freelancer with a couple of contractors. And Basecamp's design, while solid, hasn't changed much in years.

We wanted to build something for teams under 50 people who need a modern, focused tool without the enterprise price tag. That's Thicket at $49/mo flat.

$49 is not $299. That's an 83% cost reduction for the same fundamental pricing philosophy. Unlimited users, unlimited projects, every feature included. No tiers, no add-ons, no "contact sales" upsells.

The UI is modern. Dark mode first. Clean layouts, fast navigation, keyboard shortcuts that actually work. We stripped out the feature bloat that turns tools like ClickUp into a full-time job to configure. You get tasks, projects, timelines, files, and team communication. That's it. That's the product.

The Honest Counterargument

We're not going to pretend flat-rate pricing is perfect for every situation. It's not.

If you're running an enterprise with 1,000+ employees, per-user pricing can actually make sense. At that scale, vendors genuinely incur higher costs per user: more storage, more compute, more support tickets, more security and compliance overhead. Enterprise contracts also come with dedicated account managers, custom integrations, and SLAs that justify higher per-seat costs.

For teams of 2 or 3, per-user pricing is often cheaper. ClickUp at $7/user/mo for three people is $21/mo. That's $28 less than Thicket. If you're a solo freelancer, free tiers on Asana or ClickUp are genuinely fine.

But for teams between 4 and 50 people? That's where per-user pricing breaks down completely. And that's exactly the range where most growing companies, agencies, and startups live.

Three Real Scenarios

The Agency With Client Access

Picture a design agency with 15 employees and 10 active client contacts who need project visibility. On Monday.com, that's 25 seats at $12/mo each: $300/mo, or $3,600/yr. Some of those clients only log in once a week to check progress. You're paying $144/yr per client for occasional read access.

On Thicket, all 25 people are in for $49/mo. The clients can log in whenever they want. You can add a new client contact in 30 seconds without filing a procurement request or adjusting the budget. We wrote more about this in our flat-rate project management guide.

The Startup That's Growing Fast

A seed-stage startup goes from 5 to 20 people in 14 months. On Asana Business, their bill goes from $55/mo to $220/mo. That's a 4x increase that happened automatically, with no extra value delivered. No new features unlocked. Just more seats.

On Thicket, it's $49/mo on day one and $49/mo on month 14. The budget line for project management never changes, which makes forecasting simple and keeps finance happy.

The Freelancer With Contractors

A freelance product designer works with 3 contractors: a developer, a copywriter, and an illustrator. They collaborate on 4 to 5 client projects simultaneously. On per-user tools, that's 4 seats. On ClickUp, $28/mo. On Asana, $44/mo.

On Thicket, $49/mo. A bit more than ClickUp for this size, but the freelancer can scale to 10 collaborators next quarter without thinking about cost. That flexibility matters when you're building a business and don't know exactly what next month looks like.

The Decision We Made

We looked at the spreadsheet. We looked at the incentive structures. We looked at Basecamp's 20 years of profitability. And we asked ourselves: if we're building a tool for small and mid-size teams, why would we use a pricing model that punishes them for growing?

So we didn't.

$49/mo. Unlimited users. Every feature. That's the whole pricing page, and we plan to keep it that way.

If you're curious how the numbers compare across the full market, our 2026 pricing comparison covers nine tools side by side. And if you're currently on Asana, Monday, or ClickUp, the comparison pages for Asana, Monday, and ClickUp break down feature differences too.

We're not trying to be the cheapest option for solo users. We're trying to be the obvious choice for teams who are tired of paying per head for software that works better when everyone's in it.