Primo Round ExpressPay for what you use, not for how many you are
Per-user subscriptions grow your bill with headcount, not usage. Express does the opposite: you pay for the product (annual license) and the real consumption of the infrastructure, not for people.
Pay for usage, not heads
- One-time setup
- + annual license
- Cloudflare at usage
Why “per-user” suits the vendor, not you
Per-seat pricing is the SaaS favourite because it decouples price from value: you pay for every enabled person, not for what they do. In a real company most colleagues send a file now and then. Yet each of them needs a full-price license just to be able to.
The result is a bill that grows with every hire and stays the same even in months when you send almost nothing. It's an elegant way to make cost predictable for the vendor and hard to control for you.
Consumption as an honest unit
The price has four transparent parts: one-time setup, annual license, usage-based Cloudflare costs (storage and operations of your instance — egress on R2 is free) and a management fee (absent in Enterprise). No monthly fee, no per-user cost.
| Scenario | Express (license + usage) | Per-user subscription |
|---|---|---|
| 10 colleagues, occasional sends | License + real usage, 0 per user | 10 licenses, even for 1 file/month |
| Seasonal send spike | Cloudflare usage rises, then drops | Fixed cost all year |
| New hire | No extra cost to send | One more license every time |
| A month with no sends | License only, usage ~0 | You still pay the subscription |
No per-user licenses to count, no accounts to deactivate when someone leaves. Whoever needs to send, sends. You pay an annual license + real usage.
Predictable enough, flexible where it matters
“Usage-based” doesn't mean unpredictable. File-transfer bandwidth is easy to estimate from historical volumes, and on Cloudflare unit costs are among the lowest on the market. The difference is that you pay for infrastructure, not a tax on headcount.
To see how much per-seat licenses really weigh on the IT budget, read the analysis on per-user licensing costs.
FAQ
How much does Express cost exactly?
The price has four parts: one-time setup, annual license, usage-based Cloudflare costs and a management fee (absent in Enterprise). No monthly fee or per-user cost; a demo defines the amounts on your volumes.
Are there per-user costs or monthly fees?
No per-user cost and no monthly fee. There's an annual product license (same for the whole team) plus real infrastructure usage.
What happens in months when we send very little?
Only the license portion remains: Cloudflare usage gets close to zero. With a per-user subscription you'd pay the full fee anyway.