Interior design software with no per-seat pricing

Planify and NYA do not charge per seat. Here is how their flat models compare with per-user tools at three and five people, using prices checked 2026-08-03.

By Idan Mann, founder of NYA

All competitor prices on this page were taken from the vendor's own pricing page on August 3, 2026 and are linked at the bottom. Prices change — tell us if you spot one that has.

Per-seat pricing is the default in this category, but it is no longer universal. Planify stays flat for unlimited studio team members, and NYA stays flat inside each team-size tier. The remaining products below charge more when you hire.

How per-seat pricing actually shows up on the invoice

"Per seat" sounds like one thing, but the invoices work three different ways, and the difference decides what happens to your bill at every hire. Every design platform we track uses one of these three models, and you can classify any pricing page in about thirty seconds once you know what to look for.

Model one: entirely per user

Studio Designer is the clean example: there is no firm-level price at all. Every figure on its pricing page — Essentials at $69, Enterprise at $79, Premier at $109 per user per month on annual billing — is a per-person rate, so the invoice is simply headcount multiplied by tier. It is the easiest model to budget per head, and the most expensive to grow with, because employee number four costs exactly as much as employee number one, and your bookkeeper costs exactly as much as your senior designer.

Model two: a base price, plus a fee for every extra seat

This is the most common model and the easiest to misread. DesignFiles is $75 a month for Full Service plus $30 for each additional user. Programa is $71 plus $31 a seat. Gather is $199 plus $39 a seat. Houzz Pro is $249 for Pro plus $60 per extra user, with one seat included. The advertised number is the one-seat price — and one seat is the only headcount at which you pay it. The number that decides growth cost is the marginal one, what the next person adds, and it is usually in smaller type.

Model three: flat per firm

The third model prices the studio rather than each login. Planify is $29.99 a month flat, or $24.49 billed annually, for unlimited studio team members. NYA is $49 for a solo designer, $129 for up to five, and $299 unlimited. Planify has one flat team rate; NYA has tier steps, so crossing a boundary is a real jump even though seats inside the tier cost nothing. The difference reflects scope: Planify's published feature set covers delivery — FF&E, approvals, proposals, budgets and schedules — while NYA covers a broader lead-to-payment workflow.

The maths at every hiring event

Team growth never arrives as an abstract "five seats". It arrives one offer letter at a time, and per-seat billing sends an invoice with each one. Here is what four ordinary hiring events cost on each platform, computed from the same published rates used everywhere on this page.

Two things in that table deserve to be said plainly. First, the bookkeeper column is the one that stings: per-seat vendors bill for access, not usage, so someone who logs in for three hours a month can cost the same as a full-time designer. Second, flat pricing is not one model. Planify adds nothing at any hire, while NYA's second hire triggers an $80 step from Solo to Studio — the biggest single hiring event in the table — and then covers seats two through five. Compare both the marginal seat cost and the scope included in the base product.

What each extra person costs

The compounding effect

At one seat the products already differ because they solve different scopes of work. At five seats the billing models pull farther apart: Planify remains $24.49 on annual billing, NYA remains $129 inside its Studio tier, and the per-seat products reach $195–$545. Price only has meaning beside the workflow each product replaces.

One year, two hires: the cumulative bill

Rate tables still understate the difference, because you do not pay a rate — you pay a sequence of invoices while the team changes underneath them. So take the most ordinary growth story in this industry: a two-person studio in January that hires a third designer on 1 May and a fourth on 1 September. Here is the full calendar year's software bill on each platform, at the same published rates.

Read that honestly: Planify is far cheaper because it deliberately covers a narrower client-delivery workflow; NYA, Programa and DesignFiles finish within about $50–$72 for this particular growth pattern; and Houzz Pro is the costliest base-plus-seat option at $4,428 for the year. By December, Planify is still $24.49, NYA is $129, and the per-seat products are $164–$436. Hire number five adds another $360–$1,308 a year on those per-seat tools while adding nothing to either flat model.

Your own year will not match this table — different starting size, different hiring months, perhaps a departure. The calculator below runs the same published rates at whatever team size you set, and shows the monthly and annual bill per vendor, so you can do this comparison for your actual studio rather than our hypothetical one.

Two ways to use it: set it to today's headcount to sanity-check what you are paying now, then set it to where you honestly expect to be in eighteen months. The second number is the one that should choose your platform, because switching later means migrating live projects.

Questions to ask any vendor about seats

A pricing page tells you the seat rate. It almost never tells you what counts as a seat, and that definition moves real money. Ask these before your trial ends, and get the answers in writing — a support-chat transcript is fine.

1. Do clients count as seats? Your clients need to view boards, approve items and pay invoices. Client portal access is free on most platforms, but "most" is not "all" — confirm it, and confirm there is no cap on the number of client users per project.
2. Do contractors and trades count? A builder who needs the spec book, or an installer who needs the delivery schedule, is exactly the kind of occasional user that per-seat billing quietly monetises.
3. Is there a cheaper read-only or viewer role? If your bookkeeper only needs to read invoices and export reports, ask whether that access bills at the full seat rate. On a platform priced entirely per user, a full-rate bookkeeper login is $69–$109 a month for a few hours of use.
4. What happens when someone leaves? Can the seat be reassigned to their replacement, or must it be cancelled and re-bought? If it sits empty, is the unused portion refunded, credited, or simply kept? On annual billing, do you keep paying for the empty seat until renewal?
5. Can you add a seat monthly on an annual plan? Some vendors sell seats at the annual rate only — which silently turns a three-month intern into a twelve-month commitment.
6. Does adding a seat touch your contract term? Houzz Pro's own trial page states a 12-month minimum contract length. On any contracted platform, ask whether a mid-term seat addition starts a term of its own.
7. What is the seat price at renewal? Ask whether the advertised rate is promotional and what the seat fee has done over the past two years. A per-seat price rise multiplies by your entire team; a flat-plan rise does not.

When per-seat pricing is genuinely fine

Pages like this one are written by a vendor with flat pricing, so let us argue against ourselves for a moment. Per-seat pricing is not a trick; it is a model with a particular shape, and there are situations where the shape fits.

• Your headcount goes down as well as up. A per-seat bill shrinks when someone leaves — at renewal if not immediately — while a flat tier does not get cheaper until you drop below its seat band. A firm contracting from five people to two would pay $102–$105 a month on Programa or DesignFiles against $129 flat.
• Every seat is a billable professional. In a larger firm where each login belongs to a fee-earning designer, per-seat cost tracks revenue almost linearly, which is exactly what a finance director wants from a software line. This is why per-seat is the default in enterprise software: it aligns the vendor's bill with the customer's value.
• You need what the per-seat vendor is uniquely good at. If you want double-entry accounting inside your design software, Studio Designer's per-user price buys something we do not sell, and paying it can be the right call.
• The seats are genuinely expensive to serve. Per-seat pricing is defensible when each user creates real cost for the vendor — heavy rendering, dedicated support, training. It is least defensible for a login that mostly views things, which is why the viewer-role question above matters so much.

The model fails in one specific place: the small studio that intends to grow. Between two and six seats, every hire is taxed at $30–$109 a month for the rest of that person's tenure, at precisely the stage when cash is tightest and hiring is the point. That is the studio this page is for.