I had an IH account for years and never posted. Here is the first one: why I priced my HR SaaS flat instead of per-seat.

Founder of HREvio here. I have had an Indie Hackers account for a long time and never wrote a single thing - lurked, read other people's numbers, never shared my own. This is me starting the log properly. Honest place to begin: the product is live and I have 0 paying customers today. That is the point of starting now and not after it looks good.

What I want to actually talk about is the one decision everything else hangs on: I bill flat, not per employee.

Context. HREvio is core HR for small teams - people directory, leave tracking and approvals, compensation history. The market it competes with (BambooHR, Personio, Factorial, HiBob) almost universally charges per employee per month. Hire someone, your HR bill goes up. Forever.

The decision. One flat price per plan:

• EUR 29/mo - up to 25 employees
• EUR 49/mo - up to 100 employees
• EUR 99/mo - up to 250 employees

That is the entire price page. No "contact sales", no per-seat line, no usage meter.

The math that makes it interesting. Take a 50-person company. On HREvio that is EUR 49/mo - about EUR 0.98 per employee. The per-seat incumbents at that size land roughly in the EUR 250-1,250/mo range depending on which one and which add-ons. Same job, 5-25x apart. The gap is not a discount, it is a different cost structure: solo developer, no sales team, no investors to feed, EU boxes that cost what they cost.

The objection I cannot fully answer yet. "You will not survive at EUR 49 a customer." Maybe. My break-even is roughly 50 paying customers on the Standard plan - that covers hosting, tools, and a small living wage. If 50 SMBs will not pay EUR 49/mo for HR that actually works, the model is wrong and I would rather learn that from the market than from a deck. That is the open bet, and it is why I am logging this in public from zero instead of after the fact.

Why incumbents will not just copy flat pricing: revenue cannibalization. A 100-employee customer paying ~EUR 800/mo per-seat would drop to EUR 99 overnight. Multiply by an installed base. Nobody proposing that internally keeps their job. The only people who can ship flat-rate HR are people with no per-seat revenue to protect. That is the entire opening, and it closes the day I take money that needs per-seat growth.

Long version of this thesis - 4-month build context, stack, the full pricing math - is on my blog: https://gaalferov.com/blog/building-hr-saas-alone-flat-pricing-vs-per-user.html

What is honest about where it is: live and code-complete for core HR, GDPR by default, EU-hosted, EN / UK UI, public holidays for 48 countries, 1,655 automated tests on every commit. Deliberately no payroll and no document management - too country-specific / out of focus. Reports and self-serve billing are coming, not shipped - subscriptions are assigned at signup right now. 30-day trial, no credit card: https://hrevio.com

Two questions for solo / small-team founders who have shipped a flat-priced B2B SaaS to SMBs - the answers actually help me right now:

1. First 10 paying customers - what channel actually worked at the EUR 29-99/mo flat-price band? Not the channel that should work in theory, the one that paid off. Cold outbound, content / SEO, niche communities, partnerships, integrations, something less obvious?
2. When your price is 5-10x below the incumbents, prospects read it as "they will be gone in a year". What trust-signal actually moved sceptics off that worry for you? Public roadmap, recorded founder demos, transparent build-in-public numbers, customer count, response times, something else?

I will be in the comments all day. Most useful pushback to me right now is on those two questions specifically - the "will not survive at EUR 49" angle is welcome too, but the channels and trust-signals are where I am actively trying to learn from people who have lived it.