Home/Calculators/LMS Cost Calculator

LMS Cost Calculator

Seat-based LMS billing charges every employee whether they log in or not. Compare it against active-user pricing on your real numbers.

Enter your numbers

Employees you would licence (seat model)

Employees who actually use it monthly

Pull the MAU number from any existing tool's analytics, not a guess. 40 percent of headcount is typical for voluntary learning content.

Seat-based price / user / month

Active-user price / active user / month

Active-user plans carry a premium per head - the question is whether the premium beats paying for silence.

Years to model

Seat-based plan cost over the period

Active-user plan cost over the period

What the active-user model saves (or costs, if negative)

Active-user pricing wins whenever engagement sits below roughly 60 percent of licenced headcount.

Share of licences paid for but never used monthly

In most seat-based LMS rollouts this is 50-70 percent - the single largest line of pure shelfware in the typical software stack.

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.

Learning management systems are the clearest shelfware case in business software: companies buy a licence for every employee, and in most rollouts 50-70 percent of those people never log in during a typical month. Seat-based billing charges all of them anyway.

Active-user (MAU) pricing flips the model: you pay only for people who actually use the platform, at a higher per-user rate. Whether that saves money depends entirely on your engagement - which is exactly what this calculator measures.

How to use this calculator

Get the real monthly active number from any current learning platform's admin console.
Price both models for the same period - the active-user premium only makes sense against the same baseline.
Model a mid-point scenario too: engagement usually rises after a good onboarding quarter, then decays.
If seat pricing wins, negotiate the licence count down at renewal instead of switching models.

Want transparent per-user pricing without enterprise sales?

TalentLMS publishes its tiered per-user pricing openly, so you can run both models through this calculator with real numbers instead of waiting for a quote.

See TalentLMS pricing

Affiliate link. We may earn a commission at no cost to you.

Running extended enterprise learning instead?

Docebo prices for active learning across employees, partners and customers - the active-user model fits when your audience is bigger than your payroll.

See Docebo plans

Affiliate link. We may earn a commission at no cost to you.

Frequently asked questions

What is a typical LMS price per user?

Seat-based plans for corporate use run 6-15 per user per month at small and mid-size volumes. Active-user plans charge roughly 1.5-2x that per active head. Both scale down with volume, so always quote your real user count rather than using list prices.

Is seat-based or active-user pricing better?

It is purely a function of engagement. If fewer than about 60 percent of licenced users log in each month, active-user pricing usually wins. Above that, seat pricing becomes the better deal - which is why vendors push seat contracts to companies with strong compliance training mandates.

How do I reduce shelfware in an LMS contract?

Negotiate the licence count as a band rather than a fixed number (for example, true-up quarterly), or carve out mandatory-compliance audiences from voluntary-learning ones. Vendors resist both, which tells you how much margin sits in unused seats.

Next steps

LMS shelfware is the most visible waste in any software stack because the unused licences are countable. Pull the MAU number, run both models, and let engagement - not the vendor's pitch - pick the pricing model.