Safety software billed per seat gets expensive exactly when you are busiest.
Every vendor in this category will tell you their software improves participation. Most of them then price it so that participation is the one thing you cannot afford. This page shows the arithmetic on a real crew, what contractors do about it, and what that workaround does to the paper trail you are keeping the software for.
A 25-person crew, run through the two models
Twenty-five people on the payroll: three in the office, twenty-two in the field. Four active jobsites. This is a mid-size specialty contractor, which is the shape of most companies in this trade.
Billed per seat
- Seats you have to buy
- 25
- Published rate, annual billing
- $24 / seat / mo
- Monthly
- $600
- Per year
- $7,200
Hire five people in May and it becomes $8,640. Lose them in November and you are still holding the seats until renewal.
Billed per capacity
- Field accounts
- Unlimited, $0
- Active jobsites
- 4
- Plan that covers it
- Pro, $199/mo
- Per year
- $1,990
Hire five people in May and it stays $1,990. Hire fifty and it still does.
The $24 figure is SafetyCulture’s published Premium rate on annual billing, read from their pricing page in July 2026; their own examples put 20 seats at roughly $5,760 a year and 50 seats at roughly $14,400. Intelex publishes one price too — $49 per user per month with a 25-user minimum, which is an entry ticket of about $14,700 a year before anyone negotiates. The other eight vendors we tore down publish nothing at all and quote privately, so we are not going to print numbers for them.
What crews actually do — and why it costs more than the software
Nobody buys 25 seats for a 25-person crew. They buy eight, and the tablet in the gang box gets one login that four people know. It is a rational response to a pricing model that punishes participation. It is also the moment the record stops being evidence.
Signatures stop meaning anything
A toolbox talk attendance sheet signed from a shared account names the account, not the person who sat through it. You still have a document. You no longer have proof that a specific employee was trained.
Read receipts lose their subject
Hazard communication turns on whether a worker was informed. 29 CFR 1910.1200(h) requires training at initial assignment and whenever a new hazard appears. A receipt tied to a shared login cannot tell you who was informed.
Reporting quietly collapses
Near-miss reporting depends on the person closest to the hazard filing it in under a minute. Make them borrow someone's password first and the report does not get filed. What disappears is the leading indicator, not the paperwork.
This is the part that does not show up on the invoice. A compliance officer asking “who acknowledged this?” is not asking whether you own software. Shared logins turn a defensible file into a file that has to be explained, and explaining is what you were paying to avoid.
We bill capacity, and we bill the office
Three dials, all of them things a contractor already counts. None of them is a person in the field.
Active jobsites
How many jobs are open right now. Close one out and the slot comes back the same day.
Unique chemicals
A ceiling per plan, never a per-item charge. We are not going to invoice you for finishing your inventory.
Admin seats
The people who configure, file and export. Foremen and laborers are not admin seats and never count.
The rule behind the rule
Charging for a chemical count would mean charging a contractor more for keeping a complete hazard inventory — the exact thing 29 CFR 1910.1200(e) requires. So the chemical count is a plan ceiling, not a meter. The same reasoning keeps safety data sheet access, emergency mode, worker record access and full export open on every plan including the free one: gating them would put our customer out of compliance, and a compliance product that manufactures a violation has no defense.
Put the whole crew on it and see what changes
Start free on one jobsite with no card, or take fourteen days of the full product. Either way, every person on the crew gets their own account, and your bill does not move when you hire. Paid plans open at $69 a month.
Questions we get
Why does per-user pricing hurt construction more than other industries?
Because headcount in construction is a curve, not a number. A framing contractor may run 12 people in February and 40 in July. Per-seat billing invoices the July number, and it does it again for the next crew when the first one leaves. Turnover that would be normal in this trade turns into a line item that keeps climbing.
Can't we just buy fewer seats and share logins?
That is what most crews end up doing, and it is the part that costs more than the software. A shared login means every signature, every read receipt and every inspection carries the wrong name. When a compliance officer asks who acknowledged a hazard, the answer is a username four people used. The record still exists; its value as evidence does not.
What do you charge for instead?
Capacity. How many jobsites are active, how many chemicals are in the inventory, and how many admin seats run the office. Field roles — laborers, foremen, subcontractors — are unlimited and free on every plan, including the free one. Hiring does not change your invoice.
So a general contractor can invite subcontractors at no cost?
Yes. A subcontractor you invite reads the site's safety data sheets, uploads their documents and signs what they need to sign, without paying anything and without a seat being consumed. Charging a sub to hand you paperwork you are required to collect never made sense.