If one or two people write your blog, a per-seat tool charges you for the wrong thing. You pay for who can log in. What you actually want is published posts. A post budget ties the cost to what you publish. A quiet month costs less, and a busy month shows up plainly on the bill.
Below you will find how to work out what each model really costs you, a worksheet to fill in with your own numbers, and the places where each model stops making sense.
What you are really paying for with seats
Seat pricing charges for each person with access. The bill stays the same whether that person publishes eight posts or none.
That works when everyone who has a tool uses it all day. A chat app or a design tool is like that. A blog tool usually is not. On a small team, the pattern tends to look like this:
- One person writes most of the posts.
- One or two others read drafts and leave comments.
- Someone else, maybe a founder or a client, has to approve a post before it goes out.
Each of those people may need a seat. Only one of them produces posts. So the cost of each post quietly includes seats for people who spend a few minutes a month in the tool.
The months you do not publish
Small teams rarely publish on a steady rhythm. A launch eats a month. Someone goes on holiday. A client pauses. With seats, those months cost exactly the same as your best month. Divide the bill by zero posts and the number stops meaning anything.
The stack adds up
One post often touches more than one seat-based tool. You might have something to draft in, something to check the writing, something to plan the calendar and somewhere to review. Each tool has its own seat count. When you add a reviewer, you might add them to three tools. That is the hidden cost: not one seat, but one seat per tool per person.
How a post budget works
A post budget flips this around. You get an allowance based on the number of posts written. The number of people is not part of the sum.
RankMill works this way. Each team gets 100 credits a month while RankMill is in early access. Writing a post uses 10 credits, so the allowance covers 10 posts a month. The credits are shared across everyone in the team, and they reset on the 1st in UTC.
The important part is what does not spend credits. Writing is the only thing that does: approving a topic, writing a post from your own title and brief, rewriting a finished post, or importing a post for the agents to rewrite in your voice. Everything else is free. That includes:
- building the website profile
- hunting for topics
- answering the questions a topic comes with
- editing a post by chatting with the editor agent
- editing the markdown yourself
- audits and their fixes
- scheduling posts on the calendar
- publishing to GitHub and updating pull requests
Adding a person costs nothing either. Everything in RankMill belongs to a team, not to a person, and owners can invite people by email. Your reviewer, your founder and your client can all see the same projects and posts without changing what you spend.
Paid plans are not open yet, so right now there is nothing to pay. If you need a bigger allowance, you can ask for it to be raised.
A worksheet for your true cost per post
Your own numbers beat anyone else's. So this worksheet uses yours. Grab your last three months of bills and your blog's publish history.
Step 1: list every tool a post touches
Write down each tool involved, from picking a topic to getting the post live. Common ones:
- a writing or AI drafting tool
- a grammar or style checker
- a shared doc tool for review
- a content calendar or project board
- your CMS or site editor, if it charges per user
Only list the tools you would cancel if you stopped blogging. Your email does not count.
Step 2: note the monthly cost of each
For each tool, note:
- how many seats you pay for
- the price per seat
- any flat fee on top
Multiply the seats by the price per seat, then add the flat fee. That is the tool's monthly cost.
Step 3: work out the share used for the blog
Some tools do other jobs too. A shared doc tool might hold all of your company's notes. Give each tool an honest share for blog work, as a fraction. A drafting tool used only for posts is 1. A doc tool used mostly for other things might be a quarter.
Multiply each tool's monthly cost by its share.
Step 4: add it up and divide by posts
Add up the blog share of every tool. That is your monthly blog tool spend.
Now count the posts you actually published each month, not the ones you planned. Take the average over the three months.
True cost per post = monthly blog tool spend ÷ average published posts per month
Step 5: add the time nobody bills for
Tool cost is only half the story. Pick one recent post and note roughly how long each step took: finding the topic, drafting, editing, review, formatting and getting it live. If one step keeps getting stuck, that is often where posts die before they are published. A post that never goes out still cost you seats.
Reading your result
A few patterns to look for:
- Cost per post jumps in slow months. That is seat pricing doing what it does. Your spend is fixed and your output is not.
- Most of the spend is reviewers' seats. You are paying for access, not for writing.
- The number is hard to work out at all. That usually means the stack has grown bigger than anyone meant it to.
Now do the same sum for a post budget. With RankMill in early access, the tool cost of a post is the 10 credits it takes to write it. Everything after that, from edits to publishing, adds nothing.
Where seat pricing breaks down
Seat pricing breaks first in the direction small teams grow: more people who touch the work without writing it.
- Agencies. If you look after several client sites, each client may want someone to review. Seats per client add up fast, even when each client only gets a handful of posts a month.
- Occasional reviewers. A founder who approves posts once a week needs the same seat as someone who writes every day.
- Uneven output. Seats do not shrink when you publish less. A month with no posts costs the same as a full one.
Seats do work well in one case: a big team where lots of people write every day. Every seat gets used hard, so the cost per post falls on its own.
Where a post budget breaks down
A post budget is not perfect either. It helps to know where it bends.
- High output runs into the allowance. Cost follows output. If you want more posts than your allowance covers, you will hit the ceiling. In RankMill's early access, that ceiling is 10 posts a month per team, and you can ask for it to be raised.
- Rewrites spend credits. Asking for a whole new version of a finished post counts as writing. If you rewrite often, count those in your budget. Chat edits and your own edits stay free, so reach for those first when the change is small.
- Failed writes. In RankMill, a write that fails keeps its credits spent. Writing that failed post again is free, so you do not pay twice for the same post.
- Automatic writing can use up the allowance. If you switch on the team setting that approves every new suggestion, the writer starts on its own. That setting has a spending floor, so automatic writing stops while you still have credits left for the posts you ask for by hand. Pick that floor with care.
- The budget is shared. Credits belong to the team. If you run several projects in one team, they all draw from the same pool. Decide which projects get which posts.
Which model fits a small team
Ask yourself two questions.
How many people touch a post, compared to how many write it? If far more people touch it than write it, seats will charge you for access you barely use.
Does your output go up and down? If it does, a fixed seat bill makes your slow months expensive. A post budget costs less when you publish less.
For a founder, a solo marketer or an agency with a few client sites, both answers usually point the same way. You want to pay for posts, and you want everyone who needs to see them to be able to.
Fill in the worksheet before you switch
Before you change anything, run the worksheet with your own bills. It only needs your last few invoices and your publish history. Then do the post budget sum next to it. Whichever number is lower for the output you really have is the one to go with.
If you want to try the post budget side, point RankMill at your website. It builds a website profile, suggests topics, and you approve the ones worth writing. Nothing goes out without your say-so.