The enterprise tax, and why we refuse to charge it

Walk through the pricing page of almost any established business tool and you’ll find the same architecture: a cheap-looking entry tier that’s missing the one thing you came for, a “Professional” tier priced per seat at a level set for companies with procurement departments, and a “Contact sales” tier where the real product lives. We call the gap between what a small team needs and what it’s forced to pay the enterprise tax.

What does the enterprise tax look like in practice?

It’s rarely one big number — it’s a series of small ambushes. SLA timers locked behind a plan four times the price of the one you’re on. Reporting that only unlocks at the tier sized for fifty people. An “AI add-on” priced per seat on top of the per-seat price. As of July 2026, Zendesk’s entry Suite Team plan lists at €55 per agent per month, and Zoho CRM only includes its Zia assistant from the €40-per-user Enterprise tier — prices we verify from the vendors’ own pages before citing them.

None of this is evil. It’s price discrimination working as designed: the features big companies need are the levers, and everyone else gets caught in the mechanism. A five-person studio doesn’t need fifty-seat reporting — but it does need SLAs, and it pays the fifty-seat price to get them.

Why we price the way we do

Lyto has two plans, and both include all seven apps and every core feature. Seed is €10 per seat per month billed annually (€13 monthly) for teams of 1–5; Grow is €19 per seat per month billed annually (€25 monthly) for 6–20. The differences between them are capacity and the heavier AI features — not withheld fundamentals. Solve’s SLA timers, for example, are on every plan, because a two-person team’s customer promise is not less real than a fifty-person team’s.

A seat is only billed once someone accepts their invite, and seat counts adjust as your team changes. AI across the suite draws from one org-wide top-up balance you can see, not a meter per app.

What we’re not claiming

Honesty cuts both ways. Lyto is not Salesforce with a smaller invoice — the capability gap between our Pipeline and an enterprise CRM is enormous, and if you need territory management or a sandbox environment, you need the enterprise product and its price. Our claim is narrower and, we think, more useful: for a team of one to twenty, the features that actually get used fit in a far simpler product, and that product shouldn’t cost enterprise money.

The enterprise tax persists because small teams have been trained to assume it’s the cost of “real” software. We’re building the counterexample in public — the changelog is the running record, and the pricing page has the full numbers with nothing behind a sales call.