Pricing
Smartta earns when checks run. Not when people work.
Every pricing decision below follows from that one sentence. You are billed for the workers the platform actually protected in a given month — not for headcount, not for logins, and not for how many controls you switch on.
We don’t publish a rate card. The model is fixed and public; the numbers are set at discovery once we know your volume, pay frequency and system environment.
The unit
One meter: the governed worker.
A governed worker is a worker record for which at least one control executed during the billing month. You are charged per governed worker, per month.
That definition does the work. It is not headcount and not active employees. A casual who did not work is not billed. A seasonal workforce bills up in peak and down in trough. You pay for the people the platform actually protected — which removes the argument about who counts.
Why not the alternatives
- Not per check
- The moment coverage costs money, coverage stops expanding. That is the opposite of what the product exists to do.
- Not a percentage of payroll
- Opaque, unrelated to what it costs us to serve you, and it overcharges high-headcount, low-complexity employers.
- Not per pay line
- Volatile, and it penalises weekly payers — usually the higher-risk population.
What you pay for
Three lists, so there are no surprises at renewal.
Always included
- Every user and every login — there is no per-seat charge
- Support, at the level your tier sets
- Evidence retention for the full retention period
- Sandbox environments for testing rule changes
- Every control you switch on — coverage is never metered
What moves the price
- Volume band. Rates step down as governed workers rise, and banding is marginal — you are never pushed over a cliff by one extra worker.
- Pay frequency. Weekly runs more checks than monthly, and is priced accordingly.
- Run mode. A parallel run costs more than production monitoring, for as long as it lasts.
- Rule packs. Awards, agreements and domain packs are a separate line.
- Connectors, entities and pay groups beyond what your tier includes.
What never moves it
- Adding managers, approvers or viewers
- Workers on the books who were not governed that month
- Turning on more controls for the workers you already govern
- Running more checks per worker
If a change would make you cover less in order to pay less, we have priced it wrong.
Platform tiers
The tier covers your account. The meter covers your workforce.
Tiers set entities, pay groups, connectors, retention and support — the shape of the account, not the size of the workforce.
Core
A single entity, getting to continuous monitoring.
- One legal entity, two pay groups
- One connector included
- Monitoring and evidence, read API
- Business-hours support, next day
Business
Gating starts hereMulti-entity, and stopping problems before payroll.
- Three legal entities, eight pay groups
- Three connectors included
- Pre-payroll gating — a decision can be stopped, not just reported
- Read and write API, faster support response
Enterprise
Group structures, named support, tighter uptime.
- Unlimited entities and pay groups
- Five connectors included, unlimited sandboxes
- Extended evidence retention
- 24x5 support, one-hour response, named contact
Pre-payroll gating sits behind Business deliberately. Gating is the capability that separates a control from a report, and it carries the operational weight to match — it should not be in an entry tier.
Rule packs
The rules you govern against are a separate, maintained line.
A pack is the interpreted, versioned, tested rule set for an instrument or a domain. Packs are priced per governed worker so they scale with the account rather than with how often you use them, and the price covers keeping them current — variation tracking and regression testing, not a one-off build you then own the maintenance of.
Modern Award packs
From the maintained instrument library. Your first instrument is included at Business and Enterprise.
Enterprise agreements
Built to your agreement, scoped by clause count and complexity. A one-time build, then ongoing maintenance as the agreement varies.
Domain packs
Care minutes, credential currency, fatigue, minimum engagement. Built by Smartta or by a certified partner in the marketplace.
Run mode
Running two engines side by side costs more — for a short time.
If you are validating a payroll migration, Smartta can run against both the old and the new system and compare them, worker by worker. That is more checks against more data, so it carries a higher rate while it lasts.
What happens at go-live
The rate drops back to production monitoring, and nothing is rebuilt. The controls you configured to compare the two engines are the same controls that go on monitoring production. The validation project leaves a running control behind it.
Questions
What people ask before discovery
Why won’t you publish a price?
Because the model is the part that should bind us, and it is published above. The rates follow from volume, pay frequency and how many systems we connect — and we would rather set them against your actual environment than have you back into a number that turns out not to apply.
Does the price go up when we add controls?
No. Coverage is never metered. Adding a control to workers you already govern costs nothing extra — only a new rule pack is a separate line. Pricing that punished coverage would work against the reason the product exists.
We have a large casual workforce. How does that count?
Only workers a control actually ran against in that month are billed. A casual who did not work is not a governed worker. Your bill follows your real activity through the season rather than your headcount on paper.
Do we need Smartta people or a partner in the deal to get value?
No. Anything we sell as product has to be something you can buy, turn on and get a governed outcome from without a human from us being present. Implementation help exists and is genuinely useful, but it is priced separately and is never the thing that makes the platform work.
What happens when our headcount grows?
You move down a rate band, and banding is marginal — growth past a threshold re-prices only the workers above it, not the whole account. There is no renegotiation at every band edge and no reason to under-declare.
Is there a minimum?
Yes — an account floor, and a minimum per rule pack, because a maintained instrument costs the same to keep current whether ten workers or a thousand are governed against it. Both are set at discovery.
Request a demo
See it run, then we’ll price it.
A short walkthrough against a decision you actually care about. We’ll size the governed-worker count and the systems involved on the call — or start with the free care-minutes check, no login needed.