Software pricing looks like a procurement question. It is actually a practice management question, because the billing model quietly determines how you use the tool.
Two structures dominate Canadian planning software. Some vendors charge a flat rate per advisor seat. Others charge per plan, per client, or per scenario, sometimes in addition to a base subscription. The sticker prices can look comparable. The behaviour they produce is not.
The Two Models
Flat per-seat pricing charges for access. You pay a fixed amount per advisor, and what you do inside the platform does not change the bill. Run one plan or five hundred, revise them as often as you like, and the invoice is the same.
Per-plan or consumption pricing charges for output. The base subscription may be lower, sometimes substantially, but each plan, client record, or scenario carries an incremental cost. Your bill scales with how much planning you actually do.
On a spreadsheet, per-plan pricing often wins for a small book. That is the pitch, and for a genuinely low-volume practice it can be accurate. The problem is what happens to your behaviour once the meter is running.
The Mental Tax
Advisors on consumption pricing ration.
Not deliberately, and usually not consciously. But when a revision carries a cost, a series of small hesitations accumulates. A client calls in March with a changed situation. Updating the plan properly means re-running it. It is not a large charge, but it is a charge, and the plan is only four months old. You make a note to handle it at the annual review instead.
A client asks what happens if they retire two years earlier. That is another scenario. You describe the direction of the answer verbally rather than modelling it.
You are considering three drawdown sequences to find the most tax-efficient one. You model the two you think are most likely and skip the third.
Each of those decisions is individually defensible. Collectively they describe a practice giving slightly less thorough advice than it is capable of, for reasons that have nothing to do with the client and everything to do with the billing model. That cost is real and it never appears on an invoice.
There is a compliance dimension too. If your process is to keep plans current, a billing structure that discourages updates is working against your own stated standard.
What Flat Pricing Changes
Remove the per-use cost and the hesitation disappears with it.
The client who calls in March gets their plan updated in March. The early retirement question gets modelled while the client is on the phone. The third drawdown sequence gets tested, and sometimes it turns out to be the best one.
This matters most for the clients who need the most attention. Complex files, incorporated business owners, families in transition, and anyone whose situation is actively changing all generate more revisions than a straightforward file. Under consumption pricing, your most demanding clients are also your most expensive to serve properly, which is exactly the wrong incentive.
Flat pricing also makes the number predictable. You can budget a seat. You cannot easily budget "however many revisions our clients turn out to need this year," which makes planning software an unpredictable line item in a firm's budget and a recurring conversation with whoever approves it.
Questions to Ask About Any Pricing Model
Whichever structure a vendor uses, get specific answers to these before signing.
What exactly triggers a charge? A plan, a client record, a scenario, a report generation, or a revision? Vendors define these differently, and the definition is where the cost lives.
What happens when I revise? Is a revised plan a new plan for billing purposes? This is the single most important question under a consumption model.
What does a second user cost? Assistants and associates often need access. Find out whether they need a full seat.
Is the rate guaranteed, and for how long? Ask what happened to existing customers at the last price change.
What is included versus add-on? A base subscription that excludes the modules you need is not the price you will pay.
What happens if I go over? Under consumption pricing, ask whether you are cut off, auto-upgraded, or billed in arrears.
The Firm-Level Math
For a solo advisor the difference may be modest. At firm scale it compounds in both directions.
A ten-advisor practice on flat per-seat pricing has a predictable annual number that scales only when it hires. The same practice on consumption pricing has a bill that moves with client activity, which is harder to forecast and tends to grow precisely when the firm is busiest.
More significantly, the rationing behaviour multiplies across every advisor. A firm that wants a consistent standard of thoroughness across its advisors has to contend with a billing model that gently penalizes thoroughness at the individual level.
The Question Underneath
Pricing models express a view about what the software is for.
Charging for access treats the platform as infrastructure, something you use as much as the work requires. Charging for output treats each plan as a billable event, which makes commercial sense for the vendor and creates a friction the advisor absorbs.
Neither is dishonest. But if you have ever caught yourself deciding not to re-run a projection because of what it would cost, you have already experienced the difference, and it is worth pricing that into the comparison.
Ask what the model rewards. Then ask whether that matches how you want to practise.
PlanBase charges a flat rate per advisor seat. Plans, revisions, and scenarios are unlimited, so the bill does not change with how thoroughly you work.