Close CRM Pricing: The Seat Is Not the Whole Bill

Close publishes a full price list under the heading "Chloe on every plan", which already puts it ahead of most of the CRMs an outbound team shortlists. The complication is that the seat licence is one of three separate meters, and the other two do not appear on the pricing page at all. A team that budgets the seat number and stops there will be surprised by the second invoice.

Here is what Close's own surfaces publish, read on 2 September 2026, and how the three meters combine into an annual number you can actually compare.

The four plans, both billing states

Close's pricing page carries a Monthly and an Annually toggle, and both states are rendered into the same document, so each plan shows two figures. The page labels the annual saving "SAVE UP TO 50%", and the phrase "up to" is load bearing: the discount is steep at the bottom of the ladder and shallow at the top.

As published on Close's pricing page on 2 September 2026, the four plans are Solo at $19 per user per month billed monthly and $9 billed annually, Essentials at $49 and $35, Growth at $109 and $99, and Scale at $149 and $139. Growth carries the "MOST POPULAR" label. Beneath the ladder the page offers custom pricing for teams that are "Growing fast or have more complex sales needs".

The two figures on each card are alternate states of a toggle rather than a struck list price beside a live one, which matters because a struck price and a billing-state price look identical in plain text and mean opposite things. On this page the monthly figure is what a month-to-month customer pays.

Three limits separate the tiers in ways the prices alone do not show. Solo is capped at one user and 10,000 leads. Workflows are absent from Solo and Essentials, so the automation most people associate with the product starts at Growth. Call recording retention runs 30 days on Solo and Essentials, 90 days on Growth, and unlimited on Scale, which is the sort of ceiling nobody checks until a compliance question arrives.

A second meter decides the correct tier in other categories too, and a per-seat overage rate against each tier can land a small team lower than the page suggests.

Seat licenceThe number people quote

• Charged per user per month
• Monthly or annual billing state
• Four named tiers plus a custom option
• The only meter on the pricing card

AI creditsPooled per organisation

• An allowance per user per month
• Pooled across the team up to a monthly ceiling
• Refreshes monthly with no rollover
• Additional credits sold separately

Telephony and enrichmentInvoiced separately

• Calls, SMS and number rentals drawn from a usage credit balance
• Charged at the underlying carrier's pay as you go rates
• Transcription and enrichment metered per minute and per field
• Arrives on its own invoice, not the subscription one

The AI credit meter, which is now part of the ladder

Every paid plan bundles a monthly AI credit allowance, and the allowance is one of the clearer differences between the tiers. As published on Close's pricing page on 2 September 2026, Solo includes 500 credits per user per month, Essentials 1,000, Growth 1,500 and Scale 2,000. On the team plans the credits are pooled, with a stated ceiling: Essentials pools up to 10,000 credits a month, Growth up to 15,000, Scale up to 20,000. The card for each plan states that the allowance "Refreshes monthly (no rollover)" and that "Additional credits available".

Two consequences follow from the pooling rule, which the plan cards state as "Additional credits available" above the ceiling. The first is that the per seat allowance stops adding to the pool once the ceiling binds, and dividing each plan's stated ceiling by its stated per seat allowance puts that crossover at ten seats on all three team tiers. That division is arithmetic on the published figures rather than a number Close states. The second consequence is that unused credits are gone at the end of the month, so a team with seasonal activity pays for headroom it cannot bank.

Credit meters carry the same trap where no price is published at all, and a rollover ceiling on unused credits decides whether capacity survives the month.

Neither of those is unusual for a credit meter. What is worth noticing is that the credits included per dollar of seat price fall at every step up the ladder, so the marginal credit gets more expensive the higher the tier, which inverts the usual expectation about volume pricing.

What the pricing page does not price

Close's help centre is where the rest of the bill lives, and it is unusually direct about it. Read on 2 September 2026, the help centre states that calling and SMS usage is "calculated and charged separately" from the subscription, drawn from a usage credit balance that sits in a separate Usage tab, and it is explicit about the shape of the bill: "Your usage invoices will be separate from your plan subscription".

The rates themselves are the underlying carrier's. The help centre states that calls are charged per minute and phone numbers monthly according to Twilio's pay as you go voice pricing, and that all phone calls are "rounded up to the nearest minute and cent", giving the example that a 70 second call is charged as a two minute call. Rates vary by country and by number type, and the page warns that a call within one European country can cost materially less than the same call placed from a United States number.

Two billing behaviours in that document are easy to miss and expensive to discover. A forwarded inbound call is charged as two calls, the inbound leg and the outbound leg placed by the forwarding rule. A transferred call is charged as at least three, and each further transfer repeats the charge. For a team that runs a shared inbound number with forwarding, that is a real multiplier on a line item nobody modelled.

The AI tools are metered too. As published in Close's help centre on 2 September 2026, Call Assistant carries a $50 per month fee charged once per billing account plus $0.02 per transcribed minute, rounded up to the full minute, with only calls longer than 30 seconds transcribed. Enrichment costs $0.05 per field enriched, each time it is used on that field, and the page adds its own warning that "bulk actions to enrich multiple fields can become expensive". Messaging carries its own rates: $0.03 per outgoing and $0.01 per incoming MMS in the United States and Canada.

United States messaging also carries registration fees that are not optional. That help centre page publishes one time A2P 10DLC campaign fees of $4 for low volume standard brands, $44 for standard brands sending more than 6,000 messages a day, and $4 for sole proprietor brands without an EIN, plus a $15 one time campaign verification fee, followed by a recurring monthly campaign fee of $1.50, rising to $2 for sole proprietor brands without an EIN and $10 for organisations sending more than 6,000 message segments a month.

1. Step 1Count the seats

   Pick the tier by the feature you need rather than the price, since workflows and the dialers are tier gated

2. Step 2Choose the billing state

   The annual saving is steep on the entry tier and shallow at the top, so it changes the ranking of the tiers

3. Step 3Size the credit pool

   Per seat allowance times seats, capped at the plan's monthly ceiling, with no rollover

4. Step 4Model the telephony

   Minutes, numbers and messages at carrier rates, plus registration fees for United States messaging

5. Step 5Add the metered AI

   Transcription per minute with a flat monthly fee, and enrichment per field per use

The published levers most comparisons miss

Two discounts sit in the help centre rather than on the pricing page, and both are worth asking about before a first quote.

The first is a volume and commitment discount. The help centre states plainly that Close offers discounts for customers that have "10+ seats and would like to commit to Close for 12+ months", and points at its success team for the specific figure. A published willingness to discount is a different negotiating position from an unpublished one, and quoting the vendor's own page is a reasonable way to open.

The second is multi organisational billing. The help centre states that additional organisations tied to a primary billing organisation cost $50 per organisation per month, and that the Growth and Scale plans each include one additional organisation already. Linked organisations must sit on the same plan and billing schedule, a user who belongs to two of them is charged once, and add ons enabled on the billing account apply everywhere at a single fee. For a business running a sandbox, a second region or a separate brand, that is a structural saving that never appears in a per seat comparison.

Plan changes have their own asymmetry. Upgrades take effect immediately with a prorated charge, and downgrades are scheduled for the end of the current billing period, with the further condition that usage must already be under the new plan's limits before a downgrade to a limited plan will apply.

Why the ranked pricing guides disagree with the page

Search for the price and the results are dominated by independent guides, and several of them are describing a product that no longer exists in that shape. Pages ranking on this query in September 2026 still name Startup, Professional and Enterprise tiers at roughly $49, $99 and $139. Close's own pricing page on 2 September 2026 names Solo, Essentials, Growth and Scale. The figures are close enough to look right and the tier names are wrong, which is the failure mode that makes a stale pricing page more dangerous than an absent one.

The same guides generally quote a single seat number and stop, which understates a bill whose second and third meters are usage based. A phone led team on Growth is buying a power dialer whose minutes are not in the seat price, and the ratio between the two lines depends entirely on how much the team dials.

Before the Close order form

• ✓Yes: Confirm which billing state your quote uses, since both are on the page
• ✓Yes: Model a month of telephony at carrier rates for the countries you actually call
• ✓Yes: Ask whether forwarding and transfers are in your call flow, because each leg bills
• ✓Yes: Size the credit pool against seats and check where the monthly ceiling binds
• ✓Yes: Raise the published ten seat and twelve month discount before the first quote
• ✕No: Treat the seat figure as the bill

Where it fits, and where it does not

Close is arranged around the telephone, and the plan structure says so: the power dialer arrives at Growth, the predictive dialer and "Unlimited call recording retention" arrive at Scale, and the permission controls a supervised calling floor needs sit beside them under "Role-based access & permissions". A team whose motion is genuinely phone led is buying the specialist, and the alternatives roundup covers what the trade looks like from the other side. A team that is not dialing is paying for the part of the product that costs the most to build.

If the calling half is the reason Close is on the list, the general question of how many parallel lines to run is worked through in parallel dialing, and the four separate purchases behind a calling programme are set out in software for cold calling. The recording layer that the Call Assistant meter pays for has its own limits, covered in what conversation intelligence can and cannot establish.

RevenueFlow runs cold email and LinkedIn rather than the phone, so this article rests on Close's own pages rather than on operating the product. The habit worth transferring is the one the help centre makes easy here, where the line "Plan upgrades will take place immediately and a pro-rated charge will be made to reflect that" tells you more about a mid term change than the price card does: when a vendor prints a seat rate and a separate usage document, the usage document decides whether the quote was accurate. What the CRM does need to do for an outbound programme is hold the suppression list cleanly and deduplicate against the sending tool, which is a much shorter requirement than the feature grid suggests.

The short version

Close publishes four tiers on 2 September 2026, Solo, Essentials, Growth and Scale, described in turn as a "System of action for small teams" up to "Advanced control for scaling orgs", at $19, $49, $109 and $149 per user per month billed monthly, and $9, $35, $99 and $139 billed annually. Each carries a pooled monthly AI credit allowance that does not roll over. Telephony, messaging and the metered AI tools are charged separately from a usage credit balance at carrier rates, with transcription at a flat monthly fee plus a per minute charge and enrichment charged per field per use.

The two published discounts, ten seats on a twelve month commitment and a second organisation included on the upper tiers, are in the help centre rather than on the pricing page, which is where most comparisons stop reading.

If the constraint is that too few qualified conversations happen at all, the CRM tier is not the decision. See what a first campaign produces and size the seat count against a known meeting volume.

Plan names, figures, credit allowances, usage rates and billing rules taken from close.com/pricing and help.close.com, both fetched 2 September 2026, including the trial line "Your free trial includes $5 of calling and enrichment credits". Verify current terms with the vendor before relying on them.