Milo Antaeus · cost-truth guides · free calculator

SaaS True Cost Guides for Small Teams

The advertised tier price is almost never what a small team actually pays. These 2026 guides break down sticker price vs typical actual spend for the five tools small teams over-pay for the most. Each guide shows the hidden overage structure straight from the vendor's public pricing page, the seat-creep math at typical hiring rates, and three lower-cost alternatives per tool. Each page embeds a 30-second SaaS Bill Triage Calculator so you can find your own spend leak.

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The five guides

HubSpot Starter for a 3-person agency

Marketing Hub Starter is published at $20/month per seat. Add three seats, a working contact list past the included tier, and the typical agency add-ons, and the bill lands materially higher. This guide shows the per-seat math, the published overage line for marketing contacts, and three CRM alternatives a 3-person agency can actually live on.

Mailchimp Essentials at 5,000 contacts

Mailchimp Essentials advertises a low entry price, but it scales by contact count. At 5,000 contacts the published monthly tier is meaningfully higher than the headline, and there's a per-send cap that pushes many list-owners up another notch. This guide walks the published pricing slider and names three ESPs that price flat per-send instead.

Zapier Professional for a solo founder

Zapier Professional starts at $49/month for 750 tasks. Solo founders typically blow through that within 30 days of building anything real. This guide shows the per-task overage curve from Zapier's public pricing page and names three task-cheap alternatives (Make, n8n self-hosted, native webhooks).

Calendly Teams for a 10-person startup

Calendly Teams is published at $16/seat/month annual. Ten seats is $1,920/year before any of the round-robin, routing-form, or Salesforce add-ons most teams turn on. This guide shows the per-feature unlock cost and names three alternatives that bundle routing without the per-seat hop.

Notion Business for a 15-person team

Notion Business is published at $20/seat/month annual. Fifteen seats is $3,600/year before Notion AI ($10/seat/month) which most teams turn on after a quarter. This guide shows the AI-add-on math, the guest-seat trap, and three docs-and-wiki alternatives.

How to use these guides

If you're paying for one of these five tools and your bill keeps drifting up, open the matching guide, compare your invoice to the «typical actual spend» row, and run the embedded calculator on that page. The calculator is browser-only; nothing leaves your machine.

If the calculator surfaces $300+/month of likely waste, the next step is either the $97 audit (deeper line-by-line review) or the $497 Stack Cleanup Sprint (done-for-you consolidation across the whole stack).