What will a feedback tool actually cost you?

Feedback tools are priced in three broadly different ways, and the difference between them only shows up at scale. This calculator models the two that grow with you, and compares them against per-workspace tiers, which is how Looph is priced.

Seat-based pricing charges per editor — anyone who can reply to a post, change a status or move something on the roadmap. The illustrative model here is $19 per editor per month with a three-seat minimum. It is a round number chosen to show the shape of the curve, not any vendor's price. The cost is predictable but it taxes access: every time support, sales or customer success wants to read what customers are asking for, someone has to decide whether that person is worth a seat. Teams respond by sharing logins or by keeping feedback in a spreadsheet that the people who need it cannot see.

Tracked-user pricing charges by how many of your customers the tool has seen. The illustrative model here is $79 a month base plus $50 for each additional 1,000 tracked users beyond the first thousand. Those rates are ours, picked to show how the curve bends, and are not taken from any vendor’s price list. This is the model that surprises people, because the bill moves when you do nothing at all: a good launch, a spike of signups or a busy quarter raises the invoice. It also creates an awkward incentive — the more successfully you drive customers to your feedback board, the more you pay for having done it.

Per-workspace tiers charge for the plan, not for each person. That is how Looph is priced. Members are free on every plan, so adding members never moves Looph’s row. Admin seats and tracked voters do have ceilings per plan, so Looph’s row steps up when you pass one — to a published price, rather than by a per-head charge — and the top plan has no ceilings at all. The calculator picks the cheapest Looph plan with room for your admins and voters, billed monthly.

What this leaves out. These are illustrative models, not quotes and not any vendor’s list prices. Real invoices include annual discounts, startup programmes, add-ons, overage handling and negotiated enterprise terms, and every vendor changes its pricing periodically. Treat the output as a shape — which model overtakes which, and roughly where — rather than a number to put in a budget. Before committing, read the vendor's own pricing page, and check what counts as a “seat” and what counts as a “tracked user”, because those definitions vary more than the headline rates do.

The crossover point is usually the interesting part. Between the two illustrative models, seat-based pricing is cheaper for small teams with a large audience, and tracked-user pricing is cheaper for large teams with a small audience. Looph’s tiers ignore how many members you have and step up only with admins and voters.