Eight widely shopped applicant tracking systems, every figure read off the vendor's own pricing page on 10 August 2026. Five publish at least one price. Three publish none, and that absence is part of the report. None of the eight puts an implementation fee on the page, which is a different fact from not charging one.
Published entry points, checked August 2026: Breezy HR has a free tier and then $157 a month billed annually, Workable starts at $299 a month for a company of 1 to 20 employees, Ashby's Foundations plan starts at $400 a month up to 100 employees, JazzHR's Hero plan is $1,000 a year, and BambooHR charges $10 per employee a month with a flat rate from $250 a month for the smallest companies. Greenhouse, Lever, and Recruitee publish no numbers at all: every tier is quoted.
The list price is where the total starts. The main variables are implementation, which none of the eight prices publicly, add-ons like single sign-on and metered AI credits, and growth, because four of the eight meters count your whole headcount.
Disclosure: Metix AI publishes this article. We sell recruiting delivery and we do not sell an ATS, so our product competes with nothing on this list. It gets one section near the end and the closing offer; everything before that is the vendors' own pages.
An applicant tracking system is the system of record for hiring. It stores applications, moves candidates through stages, coordinates interviewers, and keeps the compliance trail intact. What it does not do is put anyone into your funnel. Every candidate an ATS manages arrived some other way: a job post, a sourcing seat, an agency, a referral. Keep that boundary in view, because it decides what a good price even means. An empty ATS at a great price is a well-organized empty room.
The boundary also places the ATS line inside a bigger ledger. SHRM's benchmarking glossary counts "talent acquisition system costs" as one component of cost per hire, next to agency fees, job board fees, and recruiter pay. We walk that full ledger in our cost-per-hire breakdown; this article prices one line of it properly.
One more habit to unlearn before the numbers: the per-seat reflex. Most B2B software is discussed in seats, so ATS pricing gets discussed that way too, and the vocabulary misleads twice. First, none of the five vendors that publish a price meters recruiter seats. Breezy HR states unlimited users on its tiers; Workable, JazzHR, and Ashby each price a flat company tier, with user counts left unstated on their pages; and where a meter counts heads, it counts every employee on your payroll. Greenhouse, Lever, and Recruitee disclose no billing unit whatsoever, and Lever says only that its pricing scales with team size and hiring needs, so seats can be neither ruled in nor ruled out for those three. Second, whatever per-something figure is published, it is the start of the total rather than the total. How the different meters behave across the whole recruiting stack is the subject of per-candidate vs per-seat pricing. Here, one question does most of the work: what, exactly, makes this vendor's number go up?
Sort the eight by what moves the bill and three real models emerge. Per employee: BambooHR, at $10 to $25 per employee a month with a flat floor for the smallest companies. Flat company tier: Workable, Breezy HR, JazzHR, and Ashby, each a fixed price, scaled by employee brackets at Workable and Ashby and by feature and job caps at Breezy HR and JazzHR. Quote-only: Greenhouse, Lever, and Recruitee, where a model surely exists but is not disclosed.
The fourth model buyers ask about, per job, appears on none of the eight pages as a meter. It appears as a cap instead. JazzHR's entry tier starts at three job postings a month, Breezy HR's free tier holds one active position, and paying more raises the ceiling. In this category you do not buy jobs. You buy a tier that tolerates your job count, and outgrowing the tier is how the price moves.
Breezy HR publishes the friendliest ladder of the eight. Bootstrap is free forever, with unlimited users and candidates and one active position, so it is a real tier rather than a trial in disguise. Startup is $157 a month billed annually, framed as two months free against the $189 month-to-month rate. Growth is $273 annually or $329 monthly, Business $439 or $529. A Pro tier above them, which adds a dedicated account manager, API access, and advanced reporting, is quote-only. The paid tiers are flat company prices with unlimited users, so what separates them is capability, not headcount. The 14-day free trial ships with 100,000 Breezy Intelligence Credits.
JazzHR publishes three annual prices and a self-serve checkout, which makes it the most transactable page here. Hero is $1,000 a year with job postings starting at three a month, Plus is $3,480 a year with up to 200 active jobs, Pro is $5,508 a year. One honesty note our tooling forced on us: the page's billing toggle claims savings of up to 24 percent for paying yearly, but the monthly amounts are computed client-side and never appear in the served HTML, so the annual figures are the only ones we could verify against the page source. No free trial is mentioned. Data migration is "included in select plans", and two add-ons, Advanced Visual Reporting and Offers and eSignatures, carry no disclosed price.
Workable prices a flat company tier scaled by an employee-count selector, nine brackets running from 1-20 employees to 1000+. The prices on screen belong to the smallest bracket: Standard at $299 a month, Premier at $599, Enterprise at $719, rising with the bracket. The annual figures on the same page, $3,588, $7,188, and $8,628 a year, are exactly twelve times the monthly ones. A "SAVE 20%" badge sits on the billing toggle while a separate banner ties 20 percent to bundling recruiting with HR, so we report both sets of numbers and decline to infer a discount the arithmetic does not show. The trial is 15 days with the full Standard feature set and no card. Every plan includes 3,000 free AI credits; more are metered at $0.12 each for 5,000, sliding to $0.095 at 50,000, with larger bundles quoted.
Ashby publishes one number and quotes the rest. Foundations, for companies up to 100 employees, shows a total of $400 a month in the pricing widget: a flat fee by company-size band, not a per-seat rate, and since the widget carries a size selector, read it as starting at $400. Annual commitment takes 10 percent off. Plus, for 101 to 1,000 employees, and Enterprise above that are quote-only, as is the standalone Analytics product. The add-ons are where the meter hides. SSO costs $100 a month on Foundations, the plan includes 200 sourcing email lookups a month, and further lookups run $90 per 1,000. No free trial is mentioned.
BambooHR is the one true per-employee meter on this list, and strictly speaking it is HR software with an ATS inside. Core is $10 per employee a month, Pro $17, Elite $25, and companies with 25 or fewer employees pay a monthly flat rate starting at $250. Only monthly prices are listed, next to a quote flow, and the page mentions automatic volume discounts, a 15 percent nonprofit discount, and a 15 percent bundle discount for adding payroll and benefits administration, so the list rate reads more like a ceiling than a settled price. The unit deserves a pause. Per employee means every employee, not every hire: a 100-person company on Core pays $1,000 a month at list, our arithmetic rather than a published figure, and the bill grows with the org chart whether hiring grows or not.
A vendor publishing no price is a finding, not a blank cell. It tells you the deal is negotiated, that two similar companies can pay different amounts, and that your calendar is part of the purchase price.
Greenhouse publishes no numbers at all. Core, Plus, and Pro each route to a sales conversation, and the page states what the price depends on: "The cost of Greenhouse is influenced by the plan you choose (Core, Plus or Pro), your hiring volume and organizational complexity, and the features and capabilities required to support your workflows." That sentence is the entire public pricing disclosure of one of the category's biggest names. No billing unit, no trial, and nothing either way on implementation.
Lever takes the same posture and extends it to the add-ons. The platform and all three modules beside it, Candidate Insights, AI Screening by VONQ, and Onboarding, sit behind "Get My Price Quote" buttons, described as flexible pricing that scales with team size and hiring needs. That is the whole disclosure: no number, no billing unit, and no indication of what any single module adds to the bill. Even the shape of a Lever deal is something you learn on the call.
Recruitee has the strangest page of the eight. We rendered it in a full browser to be fair to it, and even rendered, the three plans, Start, Advance, and Optimize, show bare euro symbols with no amounts next to demo buttons. The FAQ says more than the plan cards: subscriptions are tiered on plan, employee count, and billing period, annual billing takes 20 percent off, and contracts carry a minimum commitment of one year with monthly payment possible inside it. A free trial exists, no card required. For buying purposes, treat every Recruitee tier as quote-only.
Entry price is the lowest figure the vendor shows without a sales call. The last column reports what the pricing page says about implementation fees, and for all eight the answer is the same.
| Vendor | Entry price you can see | What scales the bill | Quoted, not listed | Implementation fee on the page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Greenhouse | Not shown | Hiring volume and complexity, per its own description | All three plans | Not mentioned |
| Lever | Not shown | Team size, per its own description | Platform and every add-on | Not mentioned |
| Workable | $299/mo, 1-20 employees | Employee bracket, nine bands | Nothing; all tiers listed | Not mentioned |
| BambooHR | $10/employee/mo; $250/mo floor at 25 or fewer | Every employee, monthly | Nothing listed as such, but quotes run in parallel | Not mentioned; Elite lists extra implementation days, no fee |
| Breezy HR | Free tier, then $157/mo yearly, $189 monthly | Feature tier; free tier caps at one position | The Pro tier | Not mentioned |
| JazzHR | $1,000/yr | Feature tier and job caps | Nothing; add-on prices undisclosed | Not mentioned; migration "included in select plans" |
| Recruitee | Not shown, bare euro symbols | Plan, employee count, billing period, per its FAQ | Effectively all three plans | Not mentioned; top plan includes onboarding support |
| Ashby | From $400/mo, up to 100 employees | Company-size band | Plus, Enterprise, and Analytics | Not mentioned |
Every figure read from the vendor's own pricing page on 10 August 2026. Workable and Ashby prices are for the smallest company bracket and rise from there. "Not mentioned" reports silence on the pricing page; it is not a statement that no fee exists. Where a tier is quoted, this article carries no number for it.
Two companies can buy the same ATS at the same list price and spend very different amounts in year one. Four variables do most of that work.
Implementation. None of the eight pricing pages names an implementation or onboarding fee. Read that carefully, because it is a fact about disclosure, not about fees. Two of the eight gesture at the work while withholding the price: BambooHR's Elite tier includes "Additional 30 Days of Implementation for Elite Features" with no fee stated, and Recruitee's Optimize plan includes onboarding support, described as expert setup assistance. When setup is priced, it is priced in the quote. Ask for the implementation line in writing, ask whether it recurs at renewal, and treat a blank on the page as a question you still have to put to a salesperson.
Add-ons. The tier gets you in; the add-ons are where the meter keeps running. On Ashby's entry plan, SSO is $100 a month, and sourcing email lookups beyond the included 200 cost $90 per 1,000. Workable meters AI credits past the included 3,000. JazzHR's reporting and e-signature add-ons carry no published price, and every Lever module is quoted. A security requirement as ordinary as single sign-on can move the real monthly figure well off the sticker.
Growth. Four of the eight meters watch your company payroll. BambooHR bills every employee. Workable steps through nine brackets. Ashby bands companies up to 100 employees and quotes beyond. Recruitee's FAQ puts employee count in the meter too, though the FAQ is the only place it says so, since its plan cards carry no price to attach a meter to. On meters like these, a good year for the business raises the ATS bill even in a quarter with zero open roles. Budget on the headcount you expect at renewal, not the headcount you have at signature.
Commitments. Recruitee's contracts run a minimum of one year, with monthly payment as a billing convenience inside that commitment. JazzHR claims yearly savings of up to 24 percent, Ashby gives 10 percent for annual commitment, Breezy HR frames annual as two months free, and Workable's 20 percent badge is ambiguous enough that we reported the raw numbers instead. None of this is sinister. All of it belongs in the spreadsheet before the demo.
For scale, set the ATS line against the whole cost of a hire. SHRM's Benchmarking: Talent Access Report, published in 2022 on 2021 survey data, put the average cost per hire at $4,683, while the median in the same table was $1,244, so the average rides on expensive outliers. Its 2025 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking data brief reports medians of $1,200 for nonexecutive hires and $10,625 for executives, with a median time to fill of 44 days for nonexecutive roles. Against those figures a $299 software month is a modest line. The swing lines sit elsewhere. SHRM's citable band for contingency recruiters is 20 to 25 percent of first-year cash compensation, published in a 2016 SHRM article. The wider 20 to 30 percent range in general circulation is a market convention we could not trace to SHRM or to any staffing-association primary page, so read 30 as the top of what founders get quoted on the phone. That reconciliation, and the fee-versus-software trade behind it, gets an article of its own.
This is not a pitch to replace your ATS, because Metix AI is not an applicant tracking system and does not replace one. The boundary from the top of this article settles where we sit. An ATS manages the people already in your funnel. It does not put people into it, and no tier upgrade changes that. Everything above was about pricing the container; filling it is a separate purchase with different meters. We priced that shelf the same way in our AI recruiting tools pricing round-up, and the line between tools that search and products that deliver is drawn in AI sourcing tool vs AI recruiter. A whole product pattern now builds on top of the ATS rather than beside it, and our comparison with hireEZ walks the clearest example of that architecture. The sourcing seat most buyers already pay for has arithmetic of its own, covered in the LinkedIn Recruiter cost breakdown.
Where Metix AI fits: we deliver interview-ready candidates into whatever system holds your process. Plans run $49 to $299 a month, 10 percent off billed annually, and the meter is a credit spent per interested, hire-ready candidate, not per employee or per bracket, so the ATS pattern of paying more because the company grew has no equivalent on our meter. Our early figures, first interviews within 24 hours on 95 percent of roles and roles filling in about a week, are company-reported. Read them with the same eye you just used on eight pricing pages.
Every figure came from the vendor's own pricing page, read on 10 August 2026, with the raw HTML checked behind the rendered page. That second step mattered three times. Workable's page contains both a monthly and an annual price node, and the annual figures are exactly twelve times the monthly ones, whatever the toggle badge suggests. JazzHR's monthly amounts are computed client-side and never reach the served HTML, so only its annual prices appear here. Recruitee's page renders to bare euro symbols in a full browser, which is why it counts as quote-only despite having a pricing page. No third-party price databases or review-site figures were used. Benchmarks cite the primary publisher: SHRM's Benchmarking: Talent Access Report (2022, on 2021 data), its 2025 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking data brief, and its 2016 article on working with search firms, all three linked below. Vendors reprice without announcing it, so the date on each figure is part of the figure.
An ATS is worth pricing carefully, and it will not fill a single role on its own. If your missing piece is candidates, bring a role that is open right now. Metix AI runs it as a free 14-day trial: 3 New Roles and 12 Credits, no card. You write the brief, you approve the outreach, and interview-ready candidates land on your calendar, next to whichever ATS you keep.
Five of the eight we checked publish at least one price on their own pricing page: Workable ($299 a month for a company of 1 to 20 employees), BambooHR ($10 per employee a month, with a flat rate from $250 a month at 25 or fewer employees), Breezy HR (a free tier, then $157 a month billed annually), JazzHR ($1,000 a year), and Ashby (from $400 a month up to 100 employees). Greenhouse, Lever, and Recruitee publish no numbers and quote every tier. Checked August 2026.
Published entry points run from free to a few hundred dollars a month, checked August 2026. Breezy HR's Bootstrap tier is free with one active position, JazzHR's Hero plan is $1,000 a year with job postings starting at three a month, Workable starts at $299 a month for companies up to 20 employees, Ashby's Foundations plan starts at $400 a month up to 100 employees, and BambooHR charges a flat monthly rate starting at $250 for 25 or fewer employees. Quote-only vendors can land anywhere, which is the point of the quote.
None of the eight pricing pages we checked mentions an implementation fee, and that silence is not a no. Two pages gesture at the work without pricing it: BambooHR's Elite tier lists 30 additional days of implementation with no fee stated, and Recruitee's Optimize plan includes onboarding support. Where a setup fee exists, it surfaces in the quote, so ask for the implementation line in writing before you sign.
No. An ATS manages the candidates already in your funnel; Metix AI puts interview-ready candidates into it, on plans from $49 to $299 a month priced per delivered candidate rather than per employee or per bracket. The two compose: teams run Metix AI alongside whichever ATS holds their process, and we do not sell it as an applicant tracking system.