Recruiting software bills one of two ways. A seat charges for access, so much per user per month, whatever comes of it. A candidate meter charges for what actually arrives. Which one costs less is not a matter of taste. It is arithmetic on your hiring volume, and the crossover sits higher than most buyers guess.
A seat bills for access: price times seats times months, with no term for output. Published examples, checked August 2026: LinkedIn Recruiter Lite at $170 a month, SeekOut Recruit Core at $149 a month on annual billing, a hireEZ solo seat at $494. A per-candidate plan bills for output instead: Metix AI runs $49 to $299 a month for up to 3 to 75 hire-ready candidates, labor included. Worked from list prices, the two models break even around 30 candidates a month, and that is before anyone pays the person a seat needs. Below the line, pay per candidate; it is cheaper, and a slow month wastes less. Above it, with a staffed team that keeps a seat busy every week of the year, the seat wins on cost per hire. Disclosure: Metix AI publishes this article and sells one of the two models compared, so hold our arithmetic to the standard we hold theirs. Every figure below is either a vendor's published price or a labeled derivation you can redo by hand.
Strip the logos off and every recruiting subscription bills on one of two curves. The first is the seat: cost equals seat price, times seats, times months. Nothing in that formula refers to output. The seat bills the same in a month with five hires and a month with none, because the thing rented was access, and access was delivered.
The second is the candidate: cost equals the plan that covers the candidates you need. Output is the only term in the formula. Time, activity, and logins never appear.
Two assumptions sit under everything below, and stating them is half the honesty of the exercise. First, a seat produces nothing on its own. Someone on your side runs the searches, writes the outreach, chases the replies, and screens what comes back, so the real cost of a seat is the license plus that person's hours. Second, a Metix AI credit includes the labor. Sourcing, outreach, screening, and scheduling happen inside the unit, so the sticker is most of the cost. Every figure that does not appear on a vendor's page is labeled a derivation from list prices, and every third-party price in this article was read from the vendor's own pages in August 2026.
LinkedIn publishes Recruiter Lite pricing on its help center rather than its marketing pages, checked August 2026: $170 a month for a single license, or $1,680 a year billed yearly. Licenses two through five run $270 a month each, or $2,670 a year, and an online subscription caps at five. Each license includes 30 InMail messages a month, with the option to purchase up to 70, and reaches your network to the third degree. Above Lite, the pricing goes dark. Recruiter Corporate and both Professional Services tiers are contact-sales on every LinkedIn page we checked, with no dollar figure anywhere. Buyers do report quotes for Corporate, and our three-way comparison with LinkedIn Recruiter and Juicebox discusses what those reports look like. The numbers appear on no LinkedIn page, so they do not appear here.
Notice the slope of the seat curve as a team grows. The second Lite license costs more than the first, $270 a month against $170, so three recruiters on Lite run $710 a month, a derivation from the two published rates. On this ladder, seat pricing does not just scale with headcount. It steepens.
hireEZ publishes exactly one number: a solo recruiter seat at $494 a month with a 7-day trial, checked August 2026. Team and enterprise plans are quoted against the stack the platform replaces. A year on the solo seat works out to $5,928 at list price, a derivation from the monthly figure, not a published annual rate. Our head-to-head with hireEZ covers what that seat actually buys.
SeekOut Recruit Core is $149 a month paid annually, which means $1,788 up front, a derivation again, or $179 billed monthly, checked August 2026. Everything above Core is quote-only. One more pattern deserves a name before the table: seats carry meters of their own. Lite meters InMail at 30 a month, 70 if you buy the top-up, and Core meters contact reveals on top of the license. A seat is rarely just a seat.
| Tool | Published entry price | A year at entry | Quote-only above |
|---|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn Recruiter Lite | $170/mo, single license | $1,680 billed yearly (published) | Recruiter Corporate, RPS and RPS+ |
| SeekOut Recruit Core | $149/mo paid annually, $179 monthly | $1,788 up front (derived) | Every higher tier, and Spot |
| hireEZ | $494/mo, solo recruiter | $5,928 at list (derived) | Team and enterprise plans |
| Metix AI | $49 to $299/mo, per candidate | $588 at entry billed monthly (derived) | Volume and specialized hiring |
Prices read from vendor-owned pages in August 2026. Cells marked derived are derivations from list prices, not published annual rates. Metix AI annual billing takes 10 percent off; LinkedIn's yearly figure is a published price.
Metix AI prices the output directly. Starter is $49 a month and covers up to 3 hire-ready candidates against 1 active role. Growth is $89 for up to 12 candidates and 3 roles. Professional is $159 for up to 30 and 6. Scale is $299 for up to 75 and 12. Annual billing takes 10 percent off every plan, and the free 14-day trial includes 3 New Roles and 12 Credits with no card.
The meter is a credit, and its definition carries the model. A credit is spent only when an interested, hire-ready candidate is booked on your calendar, after Mira has sourced across 860M+ profiles, sent outreach you approved, screened the replies, and our delivery team has reviewed the shortlist. If nobody clears your bar, the credit stays on the account. The outcome pricing page walks through that mechanism step by step.
Two boundaries on the ladder matter before any arithmetic. Plans also cap active roles, 1 on Starter up to 12 on Scale, so the plan you need follows whichever runs out first, candidates or roles. And above the ladder, volume hiring and specialized searches go through a quote path, the one part of Metix AI pricing that is not on the page.
Divide plan price by allowance and the per-unit cost falls as volume rises: about $16 a candidate on Starter at full use, about $4 on Scale. Both are derivations from list prices, not prices, and they assume the month uses what the plan covers. Speed is the other half of what the unit buys. These are early figures from the roles we have run, company-reported, so weigh them the way you would weigh any vendor's. For scale on the last one, SHRM's 2025 benchmarking data brief puts the median time-to-fill for nonexecutive roles at 44 days, counted as calendar days from the requisition opening to an accepted offer. Ours counts a different span and nobody audited it. Read them beside each other, not against each other.
Now the arithmetic the headline promised. Hold the assumptions from the top: every plan-year below is a derivation from list prices checked August 2026, labor is ignored first and reintroduced after, and the cheapest published seat in our set, the Lite license at $1,680 a year billed yearly, stands in for the seat side.
One note on units before the numbers. A candidate is not a hire. Most roles interview several people before an offer, so a team making two hires a month may need eight or ten hire-ready candidates in the pipe. Count the interviews your process consumes, not the offers it produces.
Need three candidates a month? Starter costs $588 a year billed monthly, or $528 on annual billing, derived from the published $44 yearly-billing rate on our pricing page rather than from taking ten percent off $588, which would land at $529.20. The seat costs roughly three times as much, and nobody has operated it yet.
Need twelve a month? Growth is $1,068 a year billed monthly. Still $612 under the seat.
Need thirty a month? Professional is $1,908 a year billed monthly, and the seat finally beats it on sticker, by $228. On annual billing the plan is $1,716, derived from the published yearly rate on our pricing page, and the gap narrows to $36. Call it a tie, then look at what the tie assumes: someone turns one Lite license into thirty hire-ready candidates a month, every month, inside an allowance of 30 InMail messages, 70 if you buy the top-up. At that point you are no longer comparing software prices. You are pricing the operator.
Need seventy-five a month? Scale is $3,588 a year billed monthly, which still sits under one hireEZ solo seat at the derived $5,928. Past 75 a month, though, the published Metix AI ladder ends and volume hiring goes through a quote path. That territory belongs to staffed teams on seats, and section six is about it.
| Candidates you need a month | Per-candidate plan, a year | Recruiter Lite seat, a year | The gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | Starter, $588 | $1,680 | Plan is $1,092 less |
| 12 | Growth, $1,068 | $1,680 | Plan is $612 less |
| 30 | Professional, $1,908 | $1,680 | Seat is $228 less on sticker |
| 75 | Scale, $3,588 | One seat rarely covers this | See when seats win, below |
Plan years are derivations from monthly list prices checked August 2026, before the 10 percent annual discount. The seat column is the published $1,680 yearly rate for a single Recruiter Lite license. The operator's time appears in neither column, which flatters the seat.
The sticker comparison misses the asymmetry that matters most in a slow quarter. Both models bill monthly; the difference is what the bill bought. A seat that produced nothing this month bought access that has already expired. The $170 or the $494 is gone, and next month starts from zero. A Metix AI plan bills in that month too, and its credits sit unspent, because nothing cleared the bar and nothing was drawn against the meter.
Lumpy hiring makes that asymmetry expensive. Most small teams hire three roles one quarter and none the next. Metix AI plans are monthly, sized to the month, and cancel anytime. The seat rates we quoted lean the other way, though on one of them the commitment is a choice. SeekOut Core's $149 is an annual rate paid up front. Lite is sold monthly at $170 or yearly at $1,680, and LinkedIn's own help page says you may cancel your subscription at any time; the yearly rate is the cheaper of the two, and it is money already spent. Ride a quiet quarter on a prepaid year and you have paid for three months of access nobody used.
Utilization is the quiet variable in every seat comparison, and it cuts both ways. A plan sized for thirty candidates in a month that needed eight paid for allowance it did not use; a seat rented for a sourcing sprint that ended in February keeps billing until the contract does. Neither model forgives bad forecasting. The candidate meter just fails smaller, one plan step at a time, because plans resize month to month.
There is an incentive argument underneath the cash one. Under a seat, the vendor's most profitable customer pays and barely logs in. Under a candidate meter, revenue moves only when delivery happens, so the vendor has to organize itself around delivering. We made that argument at length in a separate essay, including the ways outcome pricing gets gamed and what keeps our version honest: you approve the outreach that goes out under your bar, and a candidate who misses it never costs a credit.
Now the reversal, because the seat model is not a mistake. A recruiter who lives in the tool changes the arithmetic completely. Put a SeekOut Core seat, $1,788 a year derived, in the hands of a full-time sourcer who helps fill 40 roles that year, and the software line falls to about $45 a hire, another derivation. Be careful with what that proves. A plan sized to the same year sits in the same range: 40 hires at four candidates each is about 13 candidates a month, which is Professional at $1,908, roughly $48 a hire; at three each it is about 10 a month, which is Growth at $1,068, roughly $27, if your roles stay inside that plan's cap of 3 at once. Those are all derivations, and every one of them is dollars per hire rather than dollars per candidate, so do not read them as plan prices. The line that settles the comparison appears in none of them. SHRM's cost-per-hire definition counts recruiter pay and benefits alongside agency fees, job boards, relocation, travel, and tooling, and its 2022 benchmarking report, built on 2021 data, put the average cost per hire at $4,683 with a median of $1,244; the 2025 brief puts the nonexecutive median at $1,200. Against a full-time sourcer's loaded salary, the seat is a small line in that list and the person running it is a large one, which is our reading of the components rather than a share SHRM publishes. Per-seat pricing wins exactly when that person already exists, stays busy all year, and would be on payroll either way.
Steady volume is the second condition. On a busy seat, one more candidate costs no extra software money, caps aside, while per-candidate spend scales in a straight line, so at high volume the curves cross for good. Our own ladder concedes the point: past 75 candidates a month, published Metix AI plans stop and volume hiring is quoted. That is the country of staffed teams, and seats serve it well.
Agencies frame the far end of the same spectrum. They include the labor the way a credit does, then price it as a share of salary: the commonly quoted range is 20 to 30 percent of first-year salary, and SHRM's 2016 figure for contingency firms is 20 to 25 percent of first-year cash compensation. Agency fee vs software cost runs that fork on its own. Between the poles, seat versus credit reduces to one question: who employs the labor, you or the vendor?
Three numbers settle it. First, count candidates, not hires: take the roles you expect over the next twelve months, multiply by the candidates you actually interview per role, and divide by twelve for a monthly rate. Second, price the seat path honestly, license plus the loaded hours of whoever operates it, from the published rates above. Third, price the candidate path off the plan that covers your monthly rate. Below roughly 30 candidates a month, list prices alone decide it before labor enters. Above that, the real question is whether the operator exists.
When you employ the operator: a staffed recruiter or sourcing team, steady volume every month, and a seat that never idles. At that utilization the software line falls to about $45 a hire, a derivation, which is about what a plan sized to the same volume costs. The salary behind it is already on your payroll, and that is the real reason the seat wins.
When hiring is lumpy or nobody owns the seat work: a plan sized to the month, labor inside the unit, and a meter that moves only when a hire-ready candidate is booked.
The cluster around this article prices the parts. Our LinkedIn Recruiter cost breakdown runs the full Lite ladder to the five-license cap, and explains why Corporate publishes no price at all. AI recruiting tools pricing in 2026 covers the whole shelf, seat models and meters alike. And the cost-per-hire breakdown itemizes what sits underneath the software line in a full cost per hire.
If your volume sits below the line, the test costs nothing. Bring a role you need to fill 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 you watch what lands on the calendar. If nobody clears your bar, no credit is spent, which is the model working in miniature.
Worked from list prices checked August 2026, the crossover sits around 30 hire-ready candidates a month: a year of Metix AI Professional is $1,908 billed monthly, a derivation from list price, against LinkedIn's published $1,680 for a Recruiter Lite license billed yearly, and that is before the person a seat needs is paid. Below that volume the plan costs less on sticker alone; Growth at $89 a month is $1,068 a year against the same $1,680 seat.
Published rates, checked August 2026: LinkedIn Recruiter Lite is $170 a month for a single license or $1,680 a year, with licenses two through five at $270 a month each; SeekOut Recruit Core is $149 a month paid annually or $179 billed monthly; a hireEZ solo seat is $494 a month. LinkedIn's full Recruiter tiers, hireEZ team and enterprise plans, and everything above SeekOut Core publish no price and are quote-only.
A credit is spent only when an interested, hire-ready candidate is booked on your calendar, after sourcing across 860M+ profiles, outreach you approved, screening, and a delivery-team review. Plans run $49 to $299 a month for up to 3 to 75 hire-ready candidates, 10 percent off billed annually, and a month where nobody clears your bar draws nothing against the meter.
When the operator already exists and the seat stays busy. A SeekOut Core seat at $1,788 a year, derived from list price, worked by a full-time sourcer across 40 filled roles comes to about $45 of software per hire. A per-candidate plan sized to the same year lands in the same range, about $48 a hire on Professional at four candidates per hire and about $27 on Growth at three, so the software line is not what settles it. The operator's salary is, and it sits in neither number. Past 75 candidates a month, Metix AI's published plans end and volume hiring goes through a quote path.