Guest Seats
3 min read · Part of the Pricing cluster
Guest seats are limited-access user slots for external collaborators — clients, contractors, freelancers, external reviewers — who need to view and update specific items in your PM workspace without seeing everything or paying full user prices. Guests typically can’t create boards, access all workspace content, or manage other users. They can view and update the tasks or projects they’re explicitly invited to.
Every major PM tool has a guest-seat model. The details — how many are free, what they cost, and what they can access — is where the “£10/seat/month” headline price starts diverging from the actual invoice.
Concrete example
A 15-person agency has monday.com Standard at £10/seat. They have three active client contacts who need to view project status and leave comments on specific deliverables — not create boards, not see internal margins, not access other client accounts.
monday.com Standard includes 4 free guest seats. The first three client contacts are free. When a fourth client joins, the agency is charged at the guest seat rate (currently £4/seat/month on Standard). When client count grows to six, that’s two paid guest seats Ã- £4 = £8/month additional = £96/year.
For a 20-client agency, guest-seat costs can reach £900–£1,800/year — a line item that doesn’t appear in the original per-seat quote.
The tool-by-tool guest seat reality
| Tool | Tier | Free guest seats | Guest billing model |
|---|---|---|---|
| monday.com | Standard (£10) | 4 free | £4/seat/month beyond 4 |
| monday.com | Pro (£24) | 5 free | £4/seat/month beyond 5 |
| ClickUp | Business (£10) | 5 free | Guests at a reduced rate beyond 5 |
| Asana | Starter (£10.99) | Unlimited (basic access only) | No per-guest charge on Starter |
| Wrike | Business (£19.95) | 2 free | Business rate for additional guests |
| Teamwork | Deliver (£9.99) | 1 free client user | Per-client portal pricing |
| Basecamp | Pro Unlimited ($349 flat) | Unlimited guests | Included in flat fee |
Asana’s guest model on Starter is the most generous: unlimited guests with basic view-and-comment access, no per-guest charge. The limitation is that guests can only interact with tasks they’re specifically assigned to — no free-roaming project access.
Basecamp’s flat-fee model ($349/month Pro Unlimited) includes unlimited clients as guests — the differentiator for agencies with many clients. At 20+ client contacts, Basecamp’s flat fee becomes cheaper than per-guest billing on monday.com or Wrike.
Why it matters for your buying decision
Guest seats are the first pricing trap that surprises teams post-adoption. The evaluation question is: “How many external people will need limited access to our PM workspace, and what will that cost?”
For most internal product teams: zero clients → guest seats don’t matter → price is the headline tier.
For agencies and client-services businesses: every active client is a potential guest seat. A 10-client agency with 2 contacts per client is 20 potential guest seats. On monday.com Standard: 16 paid guests Ã- £4/month = £64/month = £768/year. That’s 17% of the total Asana Starter cost for the core team — invisible in the initial evaluation.
The procurement checklist
Before signing up for any PM tool, confirm:
- How many guest seats are free on the tier you’re evaluating?
- What is the per-seat cost for additional guests?
- Are guests billed on the same tier as full users, or a reduced rate?
- What can guests do? (View only? View + comment? Create tasks? Upload files?)
- Do guests count toward the automation action limit? (On monday.com: yes, a guest changing a status triggers an automation that counts against your cap.)
The answers to these questions will change your year-1 cost estimate by 10–30% for any team with external collaborators.