How much does ClickUp cost?

So you've been hearing a lot about this tool called ClickUp. Maybe you're on the free plan or you're considering starting with the free plan, but in the back of your mind you're thinking, how much is this tool really going to cost me? If I do decide to move my business into ClickUp, in this video, I'm going to be answering just that and not with the, you know, the marketer's answer of, well, let's consider how much time you'll save each week and subtract that from, we are going to be talking about the actual real cost that you're going to be spending on ClickUp, regardless of how much money or time it might actually save you once you do have it set up. Now, it's important to know when it comes to pricing in ClickUp, that there are two main variables that affect how much you pay for your ClickUp account. Number one is features, and number two are the number of users or the seats inside your ClickUp account. Now, the features question. The first variable of what your pricing is going to be is what's going to determine what plan you have on ClickUp. Because in ClickUp there are four major plans. There's the free plan, which is free. There's the unlimited plan, which is unlimited storage but limited everything else. There's the business plan, and then there's the enterprise plan plan. The main difference between each of these plans is the price, obviously, and what features you have access to now, because features is only half of the equation in terms of how exactly you know which ClickUp plan is right for you. I've actually made a whole other video, or I'm about to make a whole other video all about that topic that you're going to see here as soon as it's released. Now, it's probably not released at the time that this video is. Be sure to click subscribe so you're notified when that part two comes out. But for now, we're going to focus on the simpler part of the pricing equation. And, and honestly, this is the part that I think trips people up even more than the features part, because with features, it's kind of clear, do you want HIPAA compliance or do you not want HIPAA compliance? Do you want this widget or do you not want this widget? But with the users, the number of people in ClickUp, it's a little more confusing because we need to learn ClickUp's terms. Fact is, in ClickUp, the number of seats refers to people with specific levels of access. So let's break down these three types of users. Members, guests, and View Only Guests. Members are anyone who can do just about everything that ClickUp can allow for. Members can be owners, they can be admins, or just regular members. They're all part of this member category. And typically any core team members you have in your business is going to be a member in ClickUp. If we go far to the other side, we have View only Guests. View only Guests are people who are logging in only to see information. They cannot edit, they cannot comment, all they can do is observe. And this kind of access is pretty common for clients, stakeholders, or maybe contractors that you don't want to quite collaborate with as closely. But in general, if you're giving someone View Only access, it might be better to just create a public view, meaning you share a link with them rather than having them log in at all. Because again, with View Only access, they can only view, so why bother having them log in unless they're already a ClickUp user? But we've got two extremes now. Members, which includes all the different subcategories View only Guests and smack dab in the middle are the guests. Guests are people who are able to do more than just see information, but they aren't fully able to take advantage of all of ClickUp features. Features like clip seeing spaces, creating things. A lot of these features are taken back from guest access. So while guests are not unlimited, like our View only Guests, guests are something that you are not directly paying for, which is why they have such limited access. If you're looking to learn more about what the guest experience is like, I do have a video up here that kind of walks you through the guest experience. You'll see. It's, it's just kind of a watered down version of what a member will see. So, as promised, I want to give you some tangible examples as to how you can actually make the most of your ClickUp for the least amount of money. So here we are in the cost calculator, and this is just a little spreadsheet. It's an unofficial tool that we just use to keep track of all the different pricing and plans and how to work out the cost of everything. And as you can see here, every single plan requires one owner seat. And then with each additional member seat, you get more additional guest seats. And the math is a little bit funky, which is why we just built the spreadsheet instead. But what I want to use this spreadsheet for is to demonstrate the difference between having everyone in your team be members versus guests. And we're going to go through four different examples to show that. First of all, let's imagine we have a team of three. One owner, one social media manager, and a business coach. If all three of those people were members, we'd have one be an owner, because that's always required. And the additional two people being members with that, we would end up with a total cost per year of $324. If we were on the business plan, paying annually. So $324 just for three people to use ClickUp, that's if we made them all members with full access, then we would have 20 leftover guest seats that we wouldn't use. But you know what? That's the way it goes. However, we could simplify things. If we instead only made one person a member and made everyone else guests. So let's imagine the business owner is the owner of the ClickUp account and the other two were both guests. That cuts our cost by a third, and we still have 10 extra guest seats. This cost reduction is only due to making the two additional people guests instead of members. And. And considering social media managers and business coaches, neither of them are probably going to need all the features that a member has. That's probably a smart choice. One of the best things we can do as the admin of a ClickUp workspace is to cut back permissions and access. And if you're interested in more ways to simplify the ClickUp experience, check out this video. I have a feeling you're going to like it. So, back to the examples. Example number two is if we have a team of 10, one owner, one integrator and eight worker bees on the business plan. So again, we're going to be on the business plan, paying annually. We'll keep that the same here. If we made all of these people members inside ClickUp, so we'd have a total of 10 users, one owner, nine members. We'd be paying $1,080 per year, which isn't terrible. Again, if we need member features for all of those people, great, that's the cost that we're going to be paying. But do we really need member access? When I think about a team of 10, I would imagine that of those eight worker bees, not everyone is going to be an architect of the system, meaning they're going to be designing spaces and folders and structures. Most people aren't going to be doing that. They're just going to be creating tasks and doing tasks. And for that level of access, we could probably make most, if not all of the workers, guests. So let's imagine if we make the one owner and the one integrator are two members and leave everyone else. As a guess, if we did that, we'd reduce our cost to $216 per year, a pretty substantial decrease in cost over our original estimate. Or if we felt even more extreme, maybe only the integrator in the business was an owner, at everyone else was a guest, including the owner of the business. That would take us down to $108 a year, again reducing the cost massively just by reducing people from member access to guest access. For our third example, let's imagine we have a team of 31 owner, four leaders, and 25 workers on the business plan paid annually. So we're going to keep these ones constant. Again, if we made these all members, we'd be down here looking at one owner and 29 members, because again, the one owner is always required. So that gives us a total of 30 members. We have 155 guest seats that we are not using at all, and we'd be paying 3,240 per year. That's quite the investment, but it could be worth it if all 30 of those people are really going to be using member features. But hopefully you're seeing a theme here. And odds are with 25 worker bees, most of them, if not all of them, will not need all of these member features. They're going to be fine working as a guest, just getting their own things done. So let's try to max these people out as guests and give us a sense of what the lower range of this cost could be if we didn't think 3,240 per year was doing doable. So we need 30 seats in our team. So that would actually take us up to this plan here. And this actually works out quite well. The owner of the business would be the owner of ClickUp, the four managers would be the four other members, and every worker bee would be a guest. And we still have five extra guest seats left over in case we want to use them as our team grows. By maximizing guests, we would lower our overall cost of ClickUp to $540, which again, is a very substantial savings over what we looked at when we're considering everybody being a member of now, last but not least, let's go through an example where we have a team of two, two business partners with 50 clients, and they want to have each of those 50 clients have access to ClickUp as guests. If we were to make all these people members in ClickUp, 50 clients plus two co owners of the business, we'd be looking at over 5,600 per year just on ClickUp costs. And for a team of two, that's probably not going to be very doable if we maxed out them as guests. On the other hand, here, either making some of our clients members or some of our clients guests and end up between 800 and $1,000 per year. Oh, and just a pro tip, there is kind of an informal policy right now, at least as far as I know, that you can contact ClickUp to see if you can buy additional guest seats. I don't know the details of that, but if you were in a position like these guys are here and you needed more guest seats, but you didn't necessarily need more members, that might be a way to go to also reduce the cost without having to go view only for all of your clients. Now, again, this is a huge savings to make our clients get guests rather than members. But there's still one layer further we can do for this particular example to lower the cost even further. Remember what I said before about View only users? Yeah. View only users are always free. You don't have to pay for them. So if we were to just make our team one owner and one member as the two co owners of the company, ignore the guest seats entirely and only invite our clients as View only members, which again are unlimited and are free, we could lower our Overall cost to $216 for just the two members and not have to worry about adding additional guest seats at all. Now, of course your situation is not going to be identical to the ones I talked about here. And if you're choosing a different plan or different payment interval, the math is going to be different. So that's why I have the calculator I showed you on the screen here. You know this guy? Oh, this guy here. This is actually going to be in the description below. So if you want to grab this, play with it, put in your own numbers and see what comes with it, feel free to do that. And it also includes a reference tab, so if you want to change these to your own local currency or adjust the prices as ClickUp's public pricing changes, feel free to do that. This is just a little tool that we created to help make things a little bit easier. Ooh, and a quick bonus tip for everybody here. Rules have changed inside ClickUp's affiliate program in recent months. That means I'm allowed to now share with you the code LAYLA15. And why the heck am I showing you that code? Whether you're an existing ClickUp user or or a new ClickUp user, if you use the promo code LAYLA15, you will save 15% on your ClickUp account for life forever. Strangely enough, I received no financial compensation for using that. But if you're a new user, you can use our affiliate link to sign up, which will not only give you the 15%, but it'll also give us a small commission here. Be sure to like and subscribe if you enjoyed this video, and until next time, enjoy the process.