Per-Carer vs Per-User Pricing: The Hidden Cost in Home Care Software

The bill that keeps growing faster than your team

If you run a UK home care agency and your software invoice has crept up faster than your headcount, you're almost certainly on a per-user pricing model. It's the default for SaaS. Salesforce charges per user, Slack charges per user, your accounts package charges per user. So most home care platforms copy the playbook: pick a number, multiply by however many people log in.

The reason that model is more painful in home care than in almost any other sector comes down to a single number: your office-to-field ratio.

What "per user" actually means

Per-user pricing counts every account that exists on the platform. In a typical UK domiciliary agency that means:

• Every field carer with a mobile app login
• Every coordinator running the rota
• The registered manager handling compliance
• The owner, who wants to see the numbers
• Anyone in payroll or finance who exports timesheets
• Whoever handles recruitment and invites applicants
• Often, the training coordinator, the care manager, the quality lead...

On a per-user platform, each of those is a line on the invoice. The vendor doesn't care that the payroll clerk only logs in once a fortnight to run a report, or that the owner just needs read-only dashboards. They have a username, they count.

The maths that nobody shows you

Home care has the highest office-to-field ratio of any care setting. The CQC's own state-of-care reports note that domiciliary agencies typically run with one office person for every 4-6 carers, and at smaller agencies that ratio tightens further. A 6-carer agency might still need a coordinator, a registered manager and an owner-operator to run lawfully.

That makes "per user" a 25-50% mark-up on the cost you might mentally budget for. If you assume you'll pay for your carers and forget about the office, you'll get a bill that's a quarter to a half larger than expected.

A worked example: 12 carers, 4 office staff

Take a typical small-to-medium domiciliary agency:

• 12 carers in the field
• 1 registered manager (also owner)
• 1 care coordinator
• 1 part-time payroll/admin clerk
• 1 part-time recruiter / training coordinator

That's 16 user accounts on a per-user platform. At an indicative £8/user/month, that's £128/mo for software. At £10/user/month (closer to where the established home care platforms sit once you add modules) it's £160/mo. Multiply by 12 months and the office team has added £480-£640 a year to a bill that already covers your field carers.

On a per-carer model, the same agency pays for the 12 carers only. At £10 per carer per month on Pro that's £120/mo. The office team is free, and there is no cap on service users.

Run the same comparison at a slightly bigger agency (say 25 carers and 7 office) and the gap stretches: 32 per-user seats at £10 = £320/mo, vs 25 carers at £10 = £250/mo. That is £840 a year, and it grows with the size of your office team rather than your field team.

Why home care is uniquely punished by per-user pricing

Three structural reasons:

1. High office ratio. Office staff (coordinators, managers, payroll, recruitment, quality) typically run at 1 per 4-6 field workers. Compare to a retail business where you might have 1 office per 30 floor staff. Per-user pricing barely registers there.
2. Mandatory roles. CQC, CIW, Care Inspectorate and RQIA all require a Registered Manager (and often a Nominated Individual, a Care Manager, a Compliance Lead). Those aren't optional logins you can avoid.
3. Operational read-only users. Family members checking on a relative, commissioners verifying visits, auditors looking at care plans, payroll bureaux pulling data. All need access, all show up as "users" on the platform.

A pricing model originally designed for desk-based SaaS (where you pay for people who actually need the tool every day) turns into a tax on every required role in your operation. To see how each UK platform prices in practice, read our comparison of 16 home care software platforms.

What "per carer" means at homecareOS

We define "active" the same way you do operationally: a carer who actually attended at least one visit in the calendar month. The check-in time on the visit attendance record is the source of truth. If it's there, the carer counts. If it isn't, they don't.

That means:

• A carer on long-term sick leave who isn't taking visits: doesn't count
• A bank carer who picked up two visits this month: counts once (same as one who did 60 visits)
• A new starter waiting for their DBS to come back: doesn't count until they're active in the field
• A leaver who finished mid-month: counts that month, drops off the next

You don't need to deactivate anyone manually, and there's no "off-boarding fee". The materialized view that calculates active-carer counts runs nightly and rolls over at the start of each month automatically.

What we don't bill for

We charge per carer. That's it. Specifically not billed:

• Office team logins (coordinators, registered managers, owners, payroll, recruitment, quality)
• Service-user records (your 80 service users don't add a penny; Birdie and several others charge per active service user)
• Family logins to the family portal
• Commissioner-portal logins for local-authority verifiers
• Applicant logins during recruitment
• Auditor / inspector temporary logins
• API access for integrations (on Pro)

The free tier covers up to 5 carers at zero cost, with no time limit. Office logins and service users are unmetered on every plan, including the free one. Past five carers it is £10 per carer per month for every carer.

What the big platforms actually charge

Public information on home care software pricing in the UK is sparse. Most vendors don't publish list prices, which is itself a signal. Here's what's broadly known from public pricing pages, partner listings and agency reports:

• Birdie publishes a "from £X per active service user per month" model, so the bill scales with the number of people you care for, plus add-ons for some modules. Office logins are typically priced separately.
• Access Care Planning (formerly Mobizio / Servelec) doesn't publish prices; reports from agencies suggest a per-user model plus implementation and module fees.
• OneAdvanced (formerly OneTouch / Personal Care) sells on annual contracts with module-based pricing, typically per user.
• CareLineLive and CarePlanner use per-user pricing with published rates that scale by user count, often with annual contract discounts.
• Log my Care has a free starter tier (limited to care notes) and a paid plan that bundles scheduling, eMAR and reporting as a per-user add-on.
• Nourish and Person Centred Software are more residential-focused but apply per-user pricing in domiciliary deployments too.

The shared thread: per-user, often with module add-ons. The result is the same: your office team adds to the invoice.

Why we picked per-carer (and why we're sticking with it)

When we sat down to design homecareOS pricing, three things drove the decision:

1. The bill should track operational reality. A small agency hires office staff because the regulations require it, not because they want to. The software shouldn't punish them for that. Per-carer pricing tracks the thing that actually generates revenue for the agency (visits delivered), so the cost goes up only when the revenue does.
2. Onboarding new office staff shouldn't be a finance decision. We've watched small agencies hesitate to bring in a quality manager or part-time recruiter because every additional login adds to the monthly invoice. That's the wrong incentive. Better office staffing means better care, better compliance, and less burnout for the existing team.
3. It's defensible long-term. The carer count is the metric that matters. It's what scales with your business. Tying our revenue to that means our incentive is aligned with yours: we grow when you grow.

We're holding the £10 per-carer price through 2026. The free tier (up to 5 carers) is permanent, no trial, no time bomb.

The "office team unmetered" callout matters for forecasting

One often-overlooked consequence of per-user pricing: it makes your software cost unpredictable. Hire a coordinator next month? Bill goes up. Bring in a quality consultant for a 3-month CQC prep? Bill goes up. Add a payroll bureau? Bill goes up.

Per-carer pricing flattens that. You forecast based on the number of carers you expect to have delivering visits, a number you already track on your rota. The office team can grow or shrink without touching the software line in your management accounts.

For agencies running tight on margins (the typical UK domiciliary commercial reality), predictability matters as much as the absolute number.

What this looks like in practice

A few real-world scenarios we've seen:

• A 4-carer micro-agency in Wales: sits on the Free tier indefinitely. £0/mo software cost. Adds a part-time office admin without changing the bill.
• An 18-carer agency in the Midlands with 5 office staff: previously paid ~£200/mo on a per-user platform. Moved to homecareOS Pro (£180/mo for 18 carers) and gained cover finder + Bradford Factor + family portal.
• A 35-carer Scottish agency: on Pro at £350/mo. Tested adding a part-time training coordinator and a payroll temp; bill stayed at £350.

None of those numbers will exactly match your situation, but the principle holds: the bill tracks your field workforce, not your back office.

What to ask any home care software vendor

If you're evaluating platforms, homecareOS or anyone else, here are the questions that reveal the real pricing model:

1. What counts as a "user"? Is it everyone who logs in, or just the field carers?
2. Do family-portal or commissioner logins cost extra?
3. Is there a per-service-user charge? If yes, what happens when a service user is discharged or passes away, and do they drop off immediately?
4. Are eMAR, scheduling and reporting in the base price? Or are they modules with their own per-user fees?
5. What's the minimum contract? Monthly rolling, 12-month, multi-year?
6. What's the offboarding cost? If you decided to leave in 6 months, what's the actual financial penalty?

If the vendor can't answer 1-3 in plain English, that's your answer.

The bottom line

Per-user pricing is the SaaS default because it's easy to bill and easy to forecast, for the vendor. In home care it quietly penalises agencies for hiring the office staff their regulator requires them to have.

Per-carer pricing, billing on the people who actually deliver care, tracks the thing that generates your revenue, makes the software cost predictable, and removes a small but real friction every time you want to add an office hire.

It's the model we chose for homecareOS. It's why our free tier covers a 5-carer agency at £0, and why Pro at £10 per carer keeps the office team and your service users unmetered while unlocking the AI rota and cover features.

If the back-office tax has been eating into your margin, the maths is worth running.