Pricing

The three limits that actually bite

There are ten allowances in the table below and eight of them are not the reason anyone moves plan. In practice the moments that force a decision are these.

A fourth person needs an account. This is the most common one by a distance. Three people is genuinely enough for a small consultancy or a two partner practice, and it stops being enough the moment you take on an administrator, a first employee or a part time bookkeeper who needs to see what is owed. Sharing one account between two people is the wrong answer, and it is the wrong answer specifically because it destroys the audit trail: every action is attributed to whoever the account belongs to, and the first time you need to know who changed something, you cannot.

Email needs to live on the record. The free plan holds relationships, work and the calendar, and it does not hold the conversation. For a lot of organisations that is the point at which the shared inbox is still doing real work, and the answer to what was agreed still lives in someone's mailbox. Bringing email onto the record is on Standard, and it is usually the change that makes the difference between a system people check and a system people live in.

Somebody outside needs to see something. A customer portal, a booking page, a quotation a client can open, a form on your website that creates a lead. These all cross the boundary between your staff and the people you work with, and they start at Standard or Professional rather than at the first paid plan, because they are the point at which the product stops being an internal tool. The table above says which is which.

What is not a reason to move plan

Reaching a thousand relationships is not, on its own, a reason. A thousand is more than most small organisations have real relationships with, and if you are at nine hundred because you imported a list of everybody who has ever emailed you, the answer is usually to import less rather than to pay more. A system of record works better when the records in it are ones somebody would recognise.

Two rows that used to promise a tier, and now say Yes

Reporting said Configurable on Professional and Enterprise, and roles said Advanced on Enterprise. Neither was true. Reporting is the same product on all five plans, and so are roles, ownership, record sensitivity, sharing and explicit denials: there is no code anywhere that gives a higher plan a wider version of any of them. Rather than invent a feature to rescue two cells, the cells now say what the product does.

What does differ, and is on this page already, is the saved view allowance: three on Free, five on Starter, twenty five on Standard, and no ceiling above that. A saved view is where a question you configure and keep actually lives, so that row is the one to read if you are asking how much reporting a plan buys.

The reporting thing that genuinely does not exist yet is a report you schedule and have arrive by email on the first of the month. It is on the roadmap by name, it is not sold anywhere on this page, and no plan includes it.

Of the things somebody might reasonably expect a governance tier to carry, two are decided by the plan: the public interface and single sign on. Both have a row of their own above. Everything else in that part of the product is the same wherever you are.

What a module is

A capability priced per organisation rather than included in a plan, available from Standard upwards. Projects and time, invoicing, contracts, suppliers, policies and the website builder are all modules. Buying a plan does not buy any of them, and buying a module does not move you up a plan.

Why they are separate

Because most organisations want none of them and a few want one. Folding invoicing into Professional would mean every Professional customer paying for a ledger they do not use so that the minority who do can have it at a discount, which is the arrangement that makes business software expensive for the people who use least of it.

The cost of doing it this way is honest and worth stating: it is a second decision at purchase, and a table with four rows reading Module is less satisfying than one reading Yes. We would rather have the less satisfying table than the one that was there before.

What they cost

Not published yet, for the same reason the plans are not: nothing is charged while there is nobody to charge. When paid plans open, module prices open with them and appear here instead of being quoted on request.

How to tell whether you need one

Read the projects, invoices and contracts page. If the refusals it describes sound like protections you want, that is the module. If your accounting system already raises invoices, connect it instead and keep the number in one place, which is what most organisations of this size should do.

Where the modules are usually the deciding purchase

Three trades reach this question sooner than the rest. Maintenance and facilities tends to want contracts and recurring work before anything else. Professional services and consultancy more often want projects and invoicing, and rather often want neither because the accounting package already raises the invoice. The rest are on the sectors page.

Stopping payment drops you to Free

Choosing to stop does not stop your account, suspend your organisation or begin a countdown. You move to the free plan and the free limits apply to adding more. If you hold five thousand relationships and Free allows a thousand, you keep all five thousand: you can read them, search them, report on them and export them, and you cannot add the five thousand and first until you are under the limit or back on a paid plan.

A payment that fails is a different situation, and it does have a consequence worth knowing before it happens rather than after. The first two failed attempts produce a notice and nothing else. On the third the organisation becomes read only until the invoice is settled: reading, searching and exporting all keep working, and writing stops. Paying lifts it. It is deliberately not a suspension and never a deletion, because a fortnight of failed attempts is a card that expired at least as often as it is a customer who has left, and locking somebody out of their own records over a card is how to lose a customer who was going to pay.

The paid modules stop being available, which is the part that actually changes how the product feels. Your marketing audiences, matters, projects and invoices are not deleted. They are not reachable from the interface while the module is not on your plan, and they are included in your export, and they come back exactly as they were if you return to a plan that carries them.

Cancelling is a button, not a conversation

It is a button in the product, and what it does is stop the renewal: the plan you have paid for runs to the end of its period and then you are on Free, which is the arrangement described above rather than a door closing. There is no retention call, no exit interview and no form asking you to explain yourself to someone whose target you are. We would rather know why, and there is an address for that, and it is genuinely optional. A cancellation process designed to be tiring is a way of collecting revenue from people who have already decided to leave, and it is not a business we want.

Leaving means taking everything

Export produces everything you hold, in a format that opens without our software, generated on request, at any time, free, on any plan, including after you have stopped paying. There is no window that closes, no archive fee and no request to raise with support.

We would encourage you to run one now rather than at the point you need it. The value of a portability promise is entirely in whether it works on the day you have decided to leave, and the only way to know that is to have already done it once when the stakes were nothing.

Write to hello@consonas.com from the address that owns the organisation, name the allowance and the number you need, and say what you are doing. That last part is the one that matters, because it is the difference between a request we can answer in an hour and one that turns into three emails.

The cases we say yes to almost automatically are these. You are part way through a migration and need headroom for a fortnight while both systems are running. You are a registered charity. You have hit a limit because of something we got wrong, such as an import that created duplicates. You are evaluating seriously and the free limits are stopping you seeing whether it works at your size.

The case we usually say no to is a permanent free plan at paid plan volumes for a commercial organisation, and we will say so plainly rather than not replying. A free plan that quietly becomes a negotiation is a worse free plan than one with a clear edge.

A person is someone who signs in to do your work

Every member of your organisation who has an account counts as one, whatever their role, whether they are full time, part time or a contractor, and whether they sign in daily or once a quarter. An owner counts. An administrator counts. A read only role counts, because they are still a person seeing your customer records and still somebody whose access has to be granted, reviewed and eventually removed.

We have deliberately not built a cheaper read only seat. The half priced viewer licence is one of the most common lines on a CRM price list and it almost always produces the same outcome: an organisation gives half its staff a viewer seat to save money, those people cannot record what they did, and the system stops being a record of what happened. A CRM that half the company can read and none of them can write to is a report, not a system of record.

Your customers are not people

Not in the seat counting sense. Somebody signing in to the customer portal to look at their own enquiries does not consume a seat, is not limited by your plan's person allowance, and does not appear in your member list. They are a contact with portal access, and they can see their own matters and nothing else.

Somebody who leaves stops counting the moment you remove them

There is no notice period on a seat, no minimum term on an individual account and no charge for the remainder of a month. Remove the member and the count drops. Their history does not: everything they did stays attributed to them in the timeline and in the audit trail, because a record of who did what is worth nothing if it can be emptied by an offboarding.

Monthly, in advance, and cancellable at any time

The default will be a monthly subscription paid in advance, cancellable at any point, with the plan running until the end of the period you have paid for. There will be an annual option and it will be cheaper, because paying a year up front is genuinely worth something to a business of our size and it is reasonable to share some of that.

What there will not be is a minimum term on the monthly plan. A monthly price with a twelve month commitment attached is an annual contract that has been described inaccurately, and organisations discover the difference at the point they try to leave.

Changing plan takes effect immediately, and is prorated

Moving up applies straight away, because the reason people move up is that they need something now. The difference is prorated against the remainder of the period. Moving down applies at the end of the period you have already paid for, since you have paid for it.

A move down is refused while the organisation is over the smaller plan's limits, and the refusal names each one and how far over it you are, so it reads as a list of what to reduce rather than as a failure. That is deliberate: the alternative is accepting the change and then telling somebody a month later that they cannot add a record.

Adding a person in the middle of a month

Charged from the day they are added, for the remainder of the period, not from the start of it and not from the start of the next one. Removing somebody credits the remainder against the next invoice.

What happens if a payment fails

You are told, by email, to the billing address and to the owner, and the plan continues. Cards expire, banks decline things for no reason, and finance departments go on holiday, and none of those are reasons to take a business's customer records away from it on the same afternoon.

That holds for the first two attempts. On the third the organisation goes read only: everybody can still read, search and export everything, and nobody can write, until the invoice is settled, at which point it lifts. Nothing is suspended and nothing is deleted. This is the one place on the page where not paying has an effect beyond the plan you are on, which is why it is written out rather than left in the terms.

Invoices, VAT and purchase orders

Every payment produces a VAT invoice with your organisation's details, available in the product rather than only by email, and downloadable for as long as the organisation exists. Figures will be quoted excluding VAT with the prevailing rate stated beside them. Payment against a purchase order is available on Standard and above.

Who processes the data, and where. The data processing terms are published rather than sent on request, and the sub processors are a page you can read now rather than an appendix someone has to dig out. The region is the European Union or the United States, chosen when the organisation is created.