Per User vs Per Hour Software Pricing: Which Fits a Security Company?

Per user vs per hour software pricing for security firms: why per-seat billing breaks at 100%+ turnover, with worked math for a 60-guard company. Compare.

Yonah Nathan — Co-founder & Head of Product

Published July 12, 2026 Updated July 17, 2026 7 min read

Most software is priced per user because most software is sold to offices, where a "user" works 40 hours a week and stays for years. Security guarding is not that business. I've run guard operations across Houston, Corpus Christi, Las Vegas, and Florida for years, and the gap between our roster count and our scheduled hours has never been close to zero. Here's how that gap turns a reasonable-looking per-seat price into a bill that punishes you for how this industry actually works — and, in fairness, when per-user pricing is still the right call.

Why does per-user pricing break for guard companies?

Three structural reasons, none of which are the vendor's fault — they're just pricing an office-software model into a field-labor industry.

1. Turnover means you're buying licenses for guards who already quit. Security industry annual turnover is commonly cited at 100% or more. A 60-guard company doesn't administer 60 licenses a year — it activates, deactivates, and reactivates something like 120–150 licenses as people cycle through. Every one of those is an admin task, and depending on the vendor's proration policy, some of them are days or weeks of paying for a seat nobody fills. Ask any vendor two questions before signing: when does billing stop after I deactivate a user, and who has to remember to do it? In practice, the deactivation step is a task your office manager does — or forgets — 10 times a month.

2. A part-timer costs the same as a full-timer. Guarding runs on part-time labor: weekend-only officers, guards holding two jobs, retirees covering day posts. A guard scheduled 8 hours a week and a guard scheduled 40 hours a week generate wildly different revenue — at common US bill rates of $25–$35/hour, that's roughly $10,000 versus $52,000 a year — but under per-user pricing they cost you the identical license fee. The thinner your average schedule, the worse your software cost per billable hour gets.

3. Seasonal surges punish growth. Win a 90-day holiday retail contract that needs 20 extra officers, and a per-user plan bills you for 20 new seats immediately — then relies on you to claw them all back in January. Per-user pricing turns every short-term win into a licensing project. The same logic applies to per-site pricing, which taxes new locations instead of new people; I covered that model in the full security guard software cost breakdown.

What does the math look like for a real 60-guard company?

Take a 60-guard company where officers average 25 hours a week — a normal mix of full-timers, part-timers, and flex coverage. That's 1,500 scheduled hours a week, or about 6,500 hours a month. In FTE terms (one FTE = 40 scheduled hours/week), it's a 37.5-FTE operation.

Read that table honestly and you'll notice something: at the light end, per-user is cheaper on paper. A $5/seat tool at $300/month is a fraction of anyone's flat-rate platform, ours included. The comparison isn't "per-hour is always cheaper" — it's that the per-user number is unstable. It's quoted against today's roster, and your roster is the least stable number in your business. Your scheduled hours, by contrast, track your contracts — the most stable thing you have. One model bills your churn; the other bills your revenue.

When is per-user pricing actually fine?

Fairness cuts both ways, so here's where per-seat wins:

• Small, stable teams. Ten guards who've been with you for years, mostly full-time, low churn — per-user is cheap and the admin overhead is trivial. Tools like GuardsPro ($5–$10/user/month, 3-user minimum) or Connecteam (from $29/month for 30 users, though it's a generic workforce tool rather than security-specific) are legitimately good value there.
• Office-heavy usage. If mostly supervisors and dispatchers use the software and guards barely touch it, you're pricing a small, stable user set — the model fits.
• Testing the waters. A $50/month experiment is a lower-risk first step than any platform commitment, and I'd rather you digitize on a cheap per-seat tool than stay on paper DARs.

If that's you, buy the per-seat tool. The break-even comes when turnover admin, part-time ratios, and seasonal swings start showing up in your bill — for most firms that's somewhere between 25 and 50 guards.

How does FTE (per-scheduled-hour) pricing work?

The formula is one line:

FTEs = total scheduled hours per week ÷ 40. Your plan covers a block of FTEs; growth is billed per additional FTE.

This is SNTNL's model, stated plainly: Core is $1,495/month covering 30 FTEs ($45 per extra FTE), Growth is $3,495/month covering 85 FTEs ($40), Command is $6,995/month covering 200 FTEs ($35). Unlimited sites and unlimited users on every plan — guards, supervisors, office staff, and client portal logins are never billed, so turnover costs you nothing in licensing and nobody has to remember to kill a seat.

Worked example, same 60-guard company: 1,500 scheduled hours/week ÷ 40 = 37.5, billed as 38 FTEs. Core covers 30; eight extra at $45 makes the bill $1,495 + $360 = $1,855/month. Against ~6,500 scheduled hours, that's about 28.5 cents per hour — under 30¢ per billable hour, and against the $160,000–$225,000/month that 6,500 hours bills at common commercial rates, it's under 1% of revenue. Hire 15 more guards without adding hours? Bill doesn't move. Full rates are on the pricing page, and if you're comparing against a per-user-plus-per-zone quote specifically, the TrackTik alternative comparison walks through that structure line by line.

Doesn't per-hour pricing make my bill unpredictable?

The most common objection, and a fair one: seats are fixed, hours move. Three honest answers:

• Your hours are less volatile than you think. Scheduled hours track contracts, and contracts change on 30–90 day cycles, not week to week. Week-to-week schedule noise mostly cancels out at the monthly FTE level.
• Tier headroom absorbs normal movement. Plans cover a block of FTEs, so a company running 26 FTEs on a 30-FTE plan can drift up and down without the invoice changing at all. Only sustained growth past the tier changes the bill — which is the moment new revenue is paying for it.
• Ask for caps and smoothing in writing. Any per-hour vendor worth signing should agree to bill on average scheduled FTEs over the month (not the peak week) and to flag you before overage billing starts. If they won't put smoothing and notice in the contract, treat that as your answer. Standard disclaimer: contract terms are worth a read by your attorney; this is operating experience, not legal advice.

The unpredictability trade runs both directions, and per-user vendors rarely say so: their bill is "predictable" only because it doesn't go down when you lose a contract and cut 400 hours a week. A bill that tracks hours falls in your bad quarters. I know which surprise I'd rather get.

If you're not sure which model fits, do the one-line math: scheduled hours per week ÷ 40, then price every vendor against that number instead of your roster. And if you want to see it against your real schedule, book a demo — send your weekly scheduled hours ahead of the call and we'll have the comparison built before you log on.