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Applicant Tracking System Cost Calculator

Recruiting software is priced on two unrelated axes - per employee and per open job. The same company can be cheap on one and expensive on the other.

Enter your numbers

System

Total employees

Everyone on the payroll. Per-employee pricing bills on this whether you are hiring or not.

Roles open at once

Concurrent open roles, not hires per year. Per-job pricing bills on this.

Hires per year

Used to work out your cost per hire.

One-off implementation

Per-employee systems commonly charge a one-off implementation fee. Per-job systems usually do not.

Year 1 cost on your selected model

Twelve months plus any one-off implementation fee.

Year 1 cost on the other pricing model

The same company, priced per job instead of per employee or the reverse.

Difference between the two models

Changing the pricing axis is often a bigger saving than changing vendor.

Cost ratio between the models

Above 2 means the wrong axis is costing you double.

Cost per hire

Compare against agency fees - typically 15-25% of first-year salary.

Annual cost per employee

What recruiting software costs each person on the payroll, hire or no hire.

3-year cost

Three years at the same size and hiring pattern.

Estimates only. Vendor pricing and contract terms vary - always confirm figures on a written quote. Results update as you type and nothing is sent to a server.

Applicant tracking systems do not share a pricing model. Some charge per employee per month, which means you pay for your whole company whether or not you are hiring. Others charge per open job, which means you pay for hiring activity regardless of company size.

Those two axes produce completely different bills for the same company. This calculator prices both, so you can see which model suits your hiring pattern before you sit through a demo.

How to use this calculator

Enter total employees, not the number of people who will use the system. Per-employee pricing bills on company size, which is the whole point of the model.
Enter concurrent open roles, not annual hires. Per-job pricing bills on how many roles are open at the same time in a peak month.
Compare the two model figures before you compare vendors. If one is more than twice the other, the decision that matters is which pricing model you buy into.
Set implementation to zero for the per-job comparison if your chosen vendor does not charge it. The one-off fee is a real difference between the two models and it is easy to miss.
Check cost per hire against agency fees. A $500 per-hire cost looks very different against the 20% of first-year salary an agency would charge.

Hiring hard with a small headcount?

Workable prices per open job rather than per employee, which suits teams in a growth phase where hiring activity is high and headcount is still low.

See Workable pricing

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Want recruiting inside a full HR system?

BambooHR bundles an ATS with core HR, time off and performance on a per-employee rate, which makes sense if you need the HR platform anyway.

See BambooHR pricing

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Frequently asked questions

Why do the two pricing models produce such different bills?

Because they measure different things. Per-employee pricing assumes value flows to the whole company and charges for size; per-job pricing assumes value is tied to hiring activity and charges for it. A stable 200-person company hiring five people a year is expensive on the first model and cheap on the second - and a 15-person startup hiring continuously is the reverse.

Which model suits a growing company?

Per-job pricing, generally. During a growth phase you are hiring hard and headcount is lower than it will be, so you pay for the activity rather than the eventual size. Per-employee pricing gets punitive exactly when you are hiring most.

Is implementation really that expensive?

On per-employee systems, a one-off implementation fee in the thousands is common - it covers data migration, workflow configuration and training. Per-job systems are usually self-serve. Over three years the implementation fee matters less than the recurring rate, but it is the reason a cheap-looking annual deal can look worse in year one.

Should I buy an ATS at all if we only hire a few people a year?

Below roughly ten hires a year, a structured spreadsheet and a shared inbox are defensible. The case for an ATS is strongest when multiple people interview for the same role, when you need an audit trail, or when candidate experience is commercially important. Above that, the coordination cost usually exceeds the subscription.

Next steps

If the two models above differ by a factor of two or more, the pricing axis is the decision - and it is worth more of your attention than the feature comparison every vendor wants to have.