Most secure-access products in this category are priced by the seat.
At the time of writing, Tailscale Premium is priced per user. Twingate's paid team plans are priced per user. Cloudflare Zero Trust Pay-as-you-go is priced per user. The math usually has the same shape: add a user, add a line to the bill. (Vendor pricing changes; verify on each vendor's current pricing page before relying on any of this for budget planning.)
When we sat down to decide how to charge for HostAnywhere, the per-seat path was the obvious default. It is the default pricing model across much of the category. Investors understand it. Spreadsheets model it cleanly.
We chose a different model. HostAnywhere is flat-fee per network: $9/mo for Developer (5 members, 100 devices), $25/mo for Team (25 members, 200 devices). Within those limits, adding another user or device does not change the monthly price.
This post is the why, and the honest accounting of what we gave up.
Per-seat pricing has a problem
The problem with per-seat isn't that it's expensive — it's that it punishes the exact behavior the product is supposed to enable.
A secure-access product gets more valuable as more people use it. If only one engineer uses a mesh access tool at a 50-person company, its value is limited. If all 50 engineers use it, it becomes the network. The product wants to spread. Per-seat pricing creates friction at exactly the moment the product is winning.
I've watched teams play games to keep seat counts down:
- "Don't add the new contractor; just give them my login for the duration."
- "Use the on-call rotation account; we don't need real per-person identity."
- "Take the security intern's seat away; we don't need them on the network until next quarter."
None of these are decisions a product designer wants their users to make. They make the product less secure (shared accounts, no per-user audit trail) for the sake of a smaller bill.
What flat-fee changes
We priced for a small team's reality, not for a spreadsheet's growth model.
A real five-person engineering team often has:
- 5 engineers, each with a laptop and a phone (10 user devices)
- A few staging servers, some production servers, a CI runner, an admin workstation (5-15 infrastructure devices)
- Maybe an MDM-managed iPad for the office, a NAS, a printer behind a VPN Gateway
That's 20-25 devices and 5 humans. Per-seat pricing starts with the number of humans. But the real access problem includes humans, laptops, phones, servers, gateways, and services. Flat-fee covers all of it for one price.
When a team grows from 5 to 10 engineers, per-seat pricing often turns a simple product decision into a budget conversation. The tool may be working exactly as intended, but adoption starts to feel like a cost event. On flat-fee, adding more devices does not immediately change the bill. The Developer plan covers 100 devices, so a small team can grow from 25 to 50 to 75 devices without a procurement change. When the team grows beyond 5 members, they move to the Team plan at $25/mo, which covers 25 members and 200 devices.
The price changes are infrequent and predictable. They're not coupled to every hire.
Where flat-fee gets harder
Being honest, because this is a trade-off post.
Enterprise sales becomes less conventional. A 500-person company can't comfortably justify "we pay $25/mo" — finance wants to see a five-figure deal because that's how they validate that something is "serious." Per-seat pricing scales naturally into a Salesforce-shaped contract. Flat-fee doesn't. We have Enterprise (custom-priced) for this, but it requires us to actually have a sales conversation, which is more work than per-seat's autopilot growth.
Usage does not map perfectly to revenue. Per-seat pricing maps revenue to the number of people in the account, even when their actual usage differs. Flat-fee charges the same amount regardless of how heavily a team uses the product. A 5-person team that barely uses HostAnywhere pays the same as a 5-person team that runs their entire infrastructure through it. That's mostly fine, but it does mean we're "cheap" for power users and "expensive" for casual users at any given tier.
Revenue forecasting is harder. The investor playbook for "growing SaaS" is "ARPU goes up over time as customers add seats." Our ARPU stays flat-ish per network. Growth comes from acquiring more networks, not from squeezing existing ones. This is a worse story to tell in a fundraising deck. We accept that.
What flat-fee enables
A few things we couldn't have done on per-seat.
Posture conditions on the Developer plan. EDR/MDM posture gating is a "table stakes for enterprise" feature in the per-seat playbook, which is why most competitors place it on their higher per-user tiers. We can put it on the $9/mo flat plan because the cost of supporting it doesn't scale with seats — it scales with API calls to Falcon/Intune, which is a per-network cost.
Including the contractor at no extra charge. Most teams have one or two contractors at any time. On per-seat, each contractor is another monthly line item. On flat-fee, they fit under the 5-member cap of the Developer plan with no incremental cost. The procurement team doesn't have to approve a new line item every six weeks.
Pricing predictability. A team that knows their bill won't change when they hire someone behaves differently from one that has to call procurement every time. They invite contractors freely. They add infrastructure devices without spreadsheet calculations. They use the product the way it was meant to be used.
Why there are still limits
Flat-fee does not mean unlimited.
Networks still consume infrastructure, support, relay capacity, posture-sync calls, public URL traffic, and operational attention. The point is not to pretend those costs do not exist. The point is to make pricing predictable within a reasonable usage band.
Developer is sized for small technical teams. Team is sized for growing teams. Enterprise exists for customers whose usage or support needs are no longer self-serve.
The IT-buyer reality
Most secure-access products in this category are sold to IT decision-makers at companies large enough to have an "IT decision-maker." That buyer is fluent in per-seat pricing, expects it, plans around it.
Our actual users include those IT buyers, but they also include:
- Solo developers with a homelab and an iPhone they want to back up
- Three-person startups building before their first hire
- Five-person teams that just want SSH to work without a router config
- Twenty-person agencies with rotating contractor rosters
- Family setups where one parent runs the storage server for two phones
For most of those audiences, the per-seat conversation is friction. "How many users?" isn't a question they want to think about. "$9/mo, here's what you get" is.
We made a bet that the audience HostAnywhere serves best is broader than the per-seat playbook accounts for. Six months in, that bet is holding up. The signups skew toward people who say things like "I just wanted something I could pay for without a sales call." Flat-fee is the pricing that lets them.
The math, when it doesn't work
Flat-fee is genuinely worse for some shapes. A solo developer who needs posture gating today and will never have a second user is paying $9/mo for capacity they don't need. A per-user product can be cheaper for that exact shape. We're not the right product for that buyer.
It's also worse for a 200-engineer company with 5,000 devices. Our Enterprise pricing covers them, but the per-seat playbook is easier for their procurement. They might prefer Tailscale or Twingate exactly because the bill matches their existing org chart.
Flat-fee is built for the messy middle: teams of 3-50, infrastructure that mixes laptops and phones and servers, growth that doesn't fit a predictable hiring plan. That's a real and large audience, and one that the per-seat-only category was leaving underserved.
See for yourself
See current pricing at hostanywhere.io/pricing, or try HostAnywhere Free at hostanywhere.io — 10 devices, 3 members, 3 public services, no credit card. The free tier is enough to tell whether HostAnywhere's shape fits yours before you commit to anything.