Pricing is a product decision, not just a number, so I want to be transparent about ours — including the reasoning, because the reasoning is the part that should earn your trust.
The short version: Starlog is free for your whole team, and we charge when you run more than one business. That's deliberate, and it's close to the opposite of how most expense software is priced. Here's why.
Per-seat pricing is backwards for receipts
The default model in this category is per-seat: pay a monthly fee for every person you add. For a lot of software that's fine. For receipt capture, it's actively counterproductive — because the entire value of the tool is getting receipts out of people's pockets and into one organised place.
Think about what per-seat pricing does to that goal. You have a contractor who occasionally buys things for the business. Under per-seat pricing, adding them costs you every month, so you hesitate — and their receipts keep arriving as WhatsApp photos you screenshot later, or not at all. The pricing model is taxing the exact behaviour you want more of. You end up with worse records because collaboration costs extra.
That's the wrong incentive, so we didn't build it.
So your team is free
Everyone who needs to submit receipts can, at no per-seat cost. Your co-founder, your assistant, the two contractors who buy things for projects — they can all capture and submit, and you pay nothing more for adding them.
The logic is simple: the more people who participate, the more complete your records, and complete records are the whole point. Charging per submitter would mean charging you to make the product work properly. We'd rather have everyone's receipts captured and make our money somewhere that doesn't sabotage the core job.
Why "multiple businesses" is the line
So where do we charge? When you run more than one business through Starlog.
Two honest reasons. First, it's where the product genuinely does more work: separate per-company folder trees in your Drive, clean switching between entities, separate exports, separate retention clocks — the machinery that keeps two or three ventures from commingling. (We wrote about why that separation isn't optional in the multiple-businesses post.) That's real, ongoing value beyond a single set of books.
Second — and I'd rather say this plainly than dress it up — it's a fair point to monetise. Someone running several businesses is operating at a scale where a modest tool cost is easy to justify, and they're getting the most from the per-company machinery. Charging there funds the free tier for everyone running a single business with a team. It's the part of the model that lets the rest be free.
The principle underneath
If there's a rule we're trying to follow, it's this: charge for expansion of scope, not for collaboration. Adding people to one business shouldn't cost more, because that's just the tool doing its job. Running multiple businesses is a genuine step up in what the tool manages, and that's a fair place to ask you to pay.
You can disagree with where we drew the line — pricing is always arguable — but at least now you know the thinking behind it. One business with your whole team: free. More than one business: that's the paid tier, and it's what keeps the free one honest.