timesheet
Most people who look up Basecamp software cost are not comparing feature lists. They have a quote from a per-seat tool sitting in a tab, the number went up when two contractors were added, and Basecamp is the one product in the category that prices by the account instead of by the head. The question is whether a fixed monthly fee is actually cheaper for a specific team, or whether it only looks that way until the project count runs out.
The flat fee is real, and it is unusual. It is also not the only number that matters. Basecamp caps active projects and storage on every tier below the top one, and it puts time tracking behind a specific plan. Those ceilings, not the headline price, are what decide whether the bill stays flat.
Basecamp publishes five levels on its own pricing page. The prices below are the published figures as of today.
| Plan | Price | Active projects | Storage | People |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1 | 1 GB | 5 max |
| Freelancer | $25 / month | 3 | 5 GB | 20 max |
| Studio | $59 / month | 10 | 25 GB | Unlimited |
| Pro | $99 / month | 25 | 100 GB | Unlimited |
| Unlimited Edition | $299 / month, billed annually | Unlimited | 1 TB | Unlimited |
Two things in that table do more work than the prices.
The first is where unlimited users starts. Free and Freelancer have hard head counts of 5 and 20. From Studio upward there is no user limit at all, and that includes clients, contractors and guests, all of whom are counted as people but cost nothing on those tiers. A team of sixty on Studio pays the same $59 as a team of six.
The second is the word active. Basecamp counts only active projects against the limit. Archived and deleted projects do not count, so a Studio account with a hundred finished projects in the archive and ten running ones is inside its limit. That matters more than it sounds, because it turns the project cap from a lifetime total into a concurrency budget.
The feature set is deliberately flat as well. Basecamp lists the same core tools on every package, including message boards, to-dos, its Card Tables kanban view, Campfires and Pings for chat, scheduling, docs and files, and automatic check-ins. The tiers differ mainly by capacity, not by capability, with three exceptions worth knowing about: project templates and multiple tools per project start at Studio, time tracking starts at Pro, and the enhanced admin features start at the Unlimited Edition.
Flat pricing pays off in exactly one situation: a lot of people on a small number of concurrent projects. It works against you in the reverse case, a handful of people running many projects at once.
Compare the published per-seat rates of two common alternatives. Trello charges $5 per user per month on Standard when billed annually, and $10 on Premium. Asana charges $10.99 per user per month on Starter billed annually, and $24.99 on Advanced. Against Studio at $59 flat, the crossover arrives fast.
| Team size | Trello Standard | Asana Starter | Basecamp Studio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 people | $25 | $54.95 | $59 |
| 12 people | $60 | $131.88 | $59 |
| 30 people | $150 | $329.70 | $59 |
| 60 people | $300 | $659.40 | $59 |
At five people the flat fee is the most expensive option in the row. At twelve it has already drawn level with Trello Standard and costs less than half of Asana Starter. At thirty it is not close. A side by side comparison of how each vendor counts people is the fastest way to check this for a specific shortlist. This is the whole argument for flat pricing, and it is a good one for agencies, studios, schools, non-profits and any operation where a lot of occasional participants need access.
The losing case is just as clear. Five people running eighteen client projects at once do not fit on Studio. They need Pro at $99 for the project count, not for the seats, and five seats on Trello Standard would have cost $25. A small team with a wide portfolio pays for capacity it cannot avoid, while the per-seat vendors charge it almost nothing.
There is a third case that is easy to miss. If the team is two people, Basecamp's free tier allows five users but only one project, which makes it unusable for anyone juggling work. The nearest free tiers elsewhere are shaped differently: Trello's free plan allows up to 10 collaborators per Workspace and 10 boards, and Asana's free Personal plan allows 2 users with unlimited projects. None of these is generous. They are just generous about different things, and the one that fits depends on whether the constraint is people or containers.
Teams that outgrow a Basecamp plan almost never outgrow it on users. They outgrow it on active projects, and it happens in a specific way.
Basecamp's unit of organisation is the project, and it is a heavy unit. A project holds its own message board, to-do lists, chat room, schedule and files. That design pushes teams toward one project per client, per campaign, or per release, because splitting work any finer means duplicating the whole apparatus. The result is that project counts climb with the number of workstreams, not with the size of the company.
An agency with six staff and fourteen live clients is a Pro account. A software team of forty working on one product may sit comfortably on Studio for years. The head count told you nothing; the number of parallel threads told you everything.
The mitigation is archiving discipline. Because archived projects do not count, a team that closes projects promptly can live on a lower tier indefinitely, and a team that leaves everything open drifts upward through the tiers without doing more work. Before pricing any tier, count how many projects are genuinely active this month, not how many exist. For most teams that number is between a third and a half of what they expected.
It is also worth being honest about what a project cap does to habits. Teams under pressure from a project limit start merging unrelated work into one container to stay under it, which makes the board harder to read and the check-ins less useful. The money saved on the tier comes back as confusion. If the count is consistently near the ceiling, the next tier is cheaper than the workaround.
For anyone who bills by the hour, this is the detail that changes the whole calculation. Basecamp lists time tracking as included from Pro at $99 per month. It is not on Free, Freelancer or Studio.
That places an unusual shape on the decision. A five person consultancy that needs to record hours against client work cannot use the $59 tier, so the effective entry price for billable work is $99 per month regardless of how few people are involved. Flat pricing still helps at scale, but the floor is higher than the headline suggests.
The alternative is running hours somewhere else, which most small firms already do in a spreadsheet. That is genuinely cheaper and genuinely worse, because the hours stop being attached to the task they came from, and reconciling them at invoice time turns into a monthly afternoon of copying. Anyone weighing this should price both sides properly: $99 flat against $59 flat plus whatever the separate timesheet tool costs per person, plus the time spent joining the two.
Per-seat tools handle this differently and not always better. Asana includes time tracking through integrations on its free tier and natively higher up, and Trello has no native time tracking at all, relying on Power-Ups. Tools that sell hour recording as a named add-on tend to charge in the region of $7 to $9 per person per month, and a feature list is the place to confirm whether the schedule view and the hour recording sit on the same tier. For a team of five that is $35 to $45 on top of the base plan, so the arithmetic against a $99 flat fee is genuinely close and depends on how many people actually enter hours as opposed to approving them.
Four published details change the number people first write down.
Storage is capped per tier and can be extended only at the top. The included allowances run from 1 GB on Free to 1 TB on the Unlimited Edition, and Basecamp sells an additional 5 TB for $100 per month on top of that tier. Below the top tier there is no add-on: more storage means the next plan up. Teams that keep video or design files hit this before they hit the project cap.
Discounts exist and are not advertised on the plan cards. Basecamp applies 10 percent off for registered 501(c)(3) non-profits, and it is free for K-12 schools, homeschoolers and universities when used for class work only, with verification by email after signup. Only one account can be discounted.
Trials do not require a card. The free account and every trial start without payment details, so nothing auto-charges at the end. Trials run 30 days, and 45 days on the Unlimited Edition.
Downgrading works in one direction only. Paid plans can move down to other paid plans as long as current usage fits, but Basecamp does not allow a move from a paid plan back to free. Anyone who wants to end up on the free tier has to start a new free account.
Do this in four steps rather than comparing plan cards.
Count active projects for the current month and the busiest month of last year. Use the second number, because a tier that breaks in your busy season is not the tier you are on.
Count people who need to write, and separately count people who only need to read. On Studio and above this distinction costs nothing, which is where flat pricing earns its reputation. On per-seat tools it matters a great deal, and free guest seats are worth checking before assuming the seat count is the head count.
Decide whether hours have to live with the tasks. If they do, the comparison is $99 flat against a cheaper base plan plus a per-person add-on, and the answer flips depending on team size.
Then price the same team on two per-seat alternatives at their annual rates, using the crossover table above as a sanity check. Below roughly ten writers, per-seat is usually cheaper. Above twenty, flat usually wins. Between the two it comes down to the project count.
Count this month's genuinely active projects before pricing anything, because that single number decides the tier and almost nobody guesses it correctly. Then archive everything that finished, and run the crossover arithmetic for your own head count rather than the one in an article. If the sticking point turns out to be that hour recording and the schedule view sit on separate upgrades, it is worth looking at how Pinateca splits those, with every board type included from the start and timesheets counted only for the people who enter hours.
On Studio, Pro and the Unlimited Edition, yes. Those tiers list unlimited users with no per-user fee, and clients, contractors and guests are all included. The two lower tiers do have head counts: Free allows 5 people and Freelancer allows 20, so the flat fee only becomes fully flat from $59 per month upward.
Only active projects. Basecamp states that archived and deleted projects do not count, so the cap behaves like a limit on concurrent work rather than a lifetime total. A team on the 10 project tier can have far more than 10 projects in total as long as only 10 are running at once.
It is usable for one thing at a time. The free tier allows up to 5 people but only 1 project and 1 GB of storage, and a project has to be deleted before a new one can be started. That works for evaluating the product or for a single ongoing effort, and not for a team with several threads of work.
Time tracking is listed from Pro at $99 per month. It is not included on Free, Freelancer or Studio, so a small team that bills hourly faces a higher effective entry price than the $59 tier suggests, unless hours are recorded in a separate tool.
No. Basecamp allows downgrades between paid packages when current usage fits the lower limits, but not from a paid package to the free one. Going back to free requires signing up for a new free account, which means the existing projects do not come with it.
Two are published. Registered 501(c)(3) non-profits get 10 percent off, and K-12 schools, homeschoolers and universities can use it free for class work only. Both are applied after signup once documentation is emailed and verified, and only one account per organisation can be discounted.