Disclosure: this post is published by ADLR, an all-in-one workspace that appears near the end with its price, and it was written with an AI assistant. Every other number is a public list price from the vendor's own pricing page, checked on 27 October 2026 and linked so you can check it yourself.
Most small software teams don't choose a tool stack. They pick one reasonable tool at a time, and a year later the total surprises them. Here is the arithmetic for the four jobs nearly every dev shop, agency or early SaaS team pays for: email, team chat, docs and project tracking.
The core stack for 10 people
| Job | Tool and plan | List price per user a month | 10 people a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email, calendar, files | Google Workspace Business Standard | $14 (annual commitment) | $140.00 |
| Team chat | Slack Pro | $7.25 (paid yearly) | $72.50 |
| Docs and wiki | Notion Plus | $10 (paid yearly) | $100.00 |
| Projects and tasks | Asana Starter | $10.99 (billed annually) | $109.90 |
| Total | $42.24 per person | $422.40 a month |
That's $5,068.80 a year for four tools, before anything else.
Sources: Google Workspace pricing, Slack pricing, Notion pricing, Asana pricing. Monthly billing costs more for each of them. Slack Pro is $8.75 paid monthly, for example.
Swap in ClickUp, monday.com or Trello for Asana and the total moves by a few dollars per person. The shape doesn't change: four per-seat bills that each grow with every hire.
What usually gets added next
The four above are only the core. Most teams add, one at a time:
- a CRM for clients and deals,
- a help desk once customers email support,
- HR software for time off and onboarding,
- invoicing or accounting,
- an AI assistant on every seat,
- a password manager,
- glue such as Zapier to move data between all of it.
Each is another line item, usually priced per seat. We haven't put numbers on these because plans vary too much between teams. Price your own: the pattern is what matters.
The costs that never make the spreadsheet
Three costs are real but rarely budgeted:
- Admin time. Every new hire needs accounts in every tool, and every leaver needs them removed. Someone also chases failed payments and works out who has which plan. Multiply your ops person's hours per week by their loaded hourly cost.
- Integration upkeep. Automations that break when a field changes, webhooks that stop silently, tokens that expire. These failures show up as missed handoffs, not as invoices.
- Context switching. Research by Gloria Mark at UC Irvine found it takes people about 23 minutes to get back to a task after an interruption. A client request that starts in email, moves to chat, becomes a task and ends as an invoice crosses four tools, and four sets of notifications.
What consolidating replaces, and what it doesn't
An all-in-one workspace is worth considering when most of your stack is the "middle layer": email, chat, docs, tasks, a basic CRM and simple invoicing. It doesn't replace:
- design tools such as Figma,
- your code host (GitHub stays; a good workspace syncs with it),
- payment processing (invoices still get paid through Stripe or similar),
- a payroll provider,
- specialist tools your team lives in all day.
When it's the wrong call:
- One specialist tool dominates your work, as in a design studio built on Figma or a sales team run in Salesforce.
- You need audited compliance today (SOC 2, HIPAA, FINRA). Choose audited specialists.
- You're 50+ people and get real volume discounts.
Where ADLR fits
We built ADLR for this middle layer. In one workspace it has:
- email on your own domain, with shared inboxes and rules;
- team chat with channels, DMs and calls;
- projects and tasks, with GitHub sync for pull requests, CI build health and assigned issues;
- docs, a calendar and browser video meetings;
- a client CRM, a support desk, HR, and invoicing with Stripe payment links.
Adi, the built-in AI assistant, summarizes your inbox, drafts replies and turns a client brief into a project. The workspace owner can switch AI off.
It's $5 per user a month with every module included: $50 a month for the same 10 people, against $422.40 for the four tools above. The first 30 days are free with no card. ADLR's video meetings are free for anyone.
If you want to run your own numbers, there's a stack cost calculator that uses the same checked list prices.
What does your team's stack cost per person? We'd like to hear what we left out. Comments welcome.
