Why we never charge for read-only seats

Every CRM company eventually has to decide what to charge for. Most choose seats, and so did we. Seats are easy to understand, they grow with the customer, and finance teams know how to budget for them.

But seat pricing has a side effect that we have seen at almost every company we’ve worked with. It makes the CRM something you ration. When every login adds to a monthly bill, the head of sales decides who really needs one, and the answer is usually the reps and their managers. Everyone else asks a rep, or waits for an export.

Who gets left out

Think about the people at a typical software company who need to know what is happening with a customer, but rarely change anything in the CRM:

• The engineer joining a call about an integration problem.

• The finance team checking contract dates before invoicing.

• The founder who wants to read the latest emails before a board meeting.

• The marketer working out which campaigns led to deals that closed.

• The support lead who needs to know a customer is mid-renewal before escalating a ticket.

When these people can’t see the CRM, they don’t stop needing the information. They ask in Slack, someone screenshots a record, and the screenshot is out of date by the afternoon. Context that should be shared becomes something passed around by hand.

How Modal is priced

We charge for people who work in the CRM, and not for people who only look at it. In practice that means three kinds of seat:

1. Full seats for anyone who creates and edits records, sends sequences and builds views. These are the seats on your invoice.

2. Read-only seats for anyone else at your company. They can open any record, view and dashboard their permissions allow, ask Ask Modal questions, and leave comments. They are free, on every plan, with no cap.

3. Free workspaces for up to three full seats, so a founder or a small team can run their whole pipeline without a contract.

We don’t charge per record, per email synced or per contact. A team that imports 400,000 companies pays the same as one that imports 400.

Why it is good for us

This isn’t generosity. It is the pricing that best matches how a CRM becomes valuable.

A CRM is only as good as the data in it, and data stays accurate when more people rely on it. When the support lead can see that a renewal is at risk, they mention it to the account manager, and the record gets updated. When finance can check contract terms directly, they spot a wrong close date and flag it. Every person reading the CRM is another chance for a mistake to be noticed.

Read-only users also become full users. About one in five read-only seats in Modal is upgraded within a year, usually because someone in finance or customer success started using it and asked for edit access. We’d rather earn that upgrade than force it on day one.

What it costs us

Free seats are not free to run. Each one syncs nothing, since read-only users don’t connect inboxes, but they still load records, run reports and use Ask Modal. We budget for that and it adds roughly 6% to our infrastructure costs.

We also give up some revenue that a strict seat model would have collected. We think it comes back in fewer cancelled contracts. Teams where more than a third of the company has a Modal login renew at a noticeably higher rate than teams where only sales does.

A promise

We’ve been asked whether this will change as we grow. It won’t. Read-only seats will stay free, on every plan, for as long as we sell Modal. If we ever need to charge for something new, it will be for something new, not for people looking at data they already have.