Why ema doesn't charge per seat
Per-seat pricing is one of those things the software industry treats as normal that is, on closer inspection, kind of absurd. You're building a tool designed to help teams collaborate, and then you charge more when more people try to use it. That's not a pricing model. That's a penalty for doing the thing the software is supposed to enable.
The collaboration tax
Event teams aren't three people in a room. A mid-size conference might have 3 organisers, 2 coordinators, 15 volunteers, and 5 venue staff who all need some level of access to the event management platform. At $50 per seat per month — a fairly standard rate — that's $1,250 a month before anyone has sent a single email.
So what happens? The team buys 3 seats. Maybe 5 if the budget stretches. Everyone else works through the people who have access. The coordinator who needs to check a session time asks the organiser. The venue contact who needs the bump-in schedule sends an email asking for a PDF. The volunteer coordinator gets a spreadsheet export that's out of date by the time they open it.
You've now recreated the exact problem the software was supposed to solve: everything funnelled through a handful of people, communicated via email, tracked in side-channels. The platform becomes a bottleneck instead of a tool.
Access restrictions create information gaps
When only a few people can see the system, everyone else operates on secondhand information. That's where things fall through the cracks. The venue team doesn't see the updated floor plan. The AV crew is working off last week's schedule. A sponsor asks about their booth allocation and three people have to check with each other before someone can answer.
This isn't a training problem or a process problem. It's an access problem. The information exists — it's just locked behind a paywall that scales with headcount.
How ema prices instead
ema packages start from $499/month. No per-seat fees. Add your whole team, your venue contacts, your AV crew, your volunteer coordinators, your sponsor liaisons. Everyone who needs access gets access.
This isn't charity — it's a better product decision. More people using the system means more data in the system. More data means the AI agent has richer context to work with. The collaboration tools — comments, mentions, real-time updates — actually function as designed when the people who need to communicate are all in the same place. Fewer things get lost. Fewer emails get sent asking "can you check the platform and let me know."
Some costs genuinely move with event shape. SMS, livestreaming, VOD, high-volume sending, premium storage, and on-site services have real supplier costs behind them. We bill those separately instead of hiding them in every package.
That distinction matters. Access should not be rationed by headcount. Hard costs should be visible. Your team should know what is included, what is separate, and why.
The incentive problem
Per-seat pricing creates a perverse incentive. The vendor wants you to add more seats. You want to add fewer. The vendor's revenue goes up when your team grows, which sounds aligned until you realise it means the vendor is financially incentivised to make their product hard to use with fewer people — or at least not incentivised to make it easy.
Package-first pricing aligns us with you. We want as many people on your team using ema as possible, because it makes the product work better. We're not hoping you'll move to a bigger plan because your volunteer coordinator needs to check a schedule.
The bottom line
If your event management platform charges you more when your team collaborates more, it's working against you. Software should get more useful as more people use it, not more expensive.
That's why ema has no per-seat fees. Your whole team can be in the same workspace. The way it should work.