Close CRM Pricing: Four Published Rates and Two Invisible Bills

Close CRM publishes four prices and three bills. The prices are the easy part.

OUR TAKE: Budget the licence at Growth rather than Essentials, because workflows start there. Then build two more lines nobody will build for you: telephony at carrier cost, and AI credits whose included allowance stops scaling at ten users regardless of how many seats you buy. On a team of fifteen making calls, those two can exceed the licence.

## The rates

Per user, per month. The second column is the rate when the year is paid up front. The vendor does not publish an annual total.

Tier	Month to month	Billed annually	Annual cost per seat
Solo	$19	$9	$108
Essentials	$49	$35	$420
Growth	$109	$99	$1,188
Scale	$149	$139	$1,668
Custom	not published	not published	not published

The annual column is what the page shows by default. The annual figures in that column are monthly rates at annual billing, not yearly totals, and the vendor's own file for AI systems says so in words the cards do not use^[2].

A 14-day trial takes no credit card, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee after purchase^[1].

## The annual discount is not one number

The page carries a badge offering savings of up to 50%. Here is what the published figures actually give:

Tier	Monthly	Annual	Actual saving
Solo	$19	$9	52.6%
Essentials	$49	$35	28.6%
Growth	$109	$99	9.2%
Scale	$149	$139	6.7%

The badge is beaten at the bottom and off by a factor of seven at the top. On the tier most teams buy, twelve months of commitment is worth 9.2%.

That is a thin return for giving up flexibility, and it is worth saying that monthly billing here carries no contract at all: subscriptions can be upgraded, downgraded or cancelled at any time^[3].

Solo is not a cheap plan, it is a different product

Nine dollars a user per month is the lowest entry price in this category. It buys one user, a cap of 10,000 leads, and no workflows^[1].

The card describes it by subtraction rather than addition: everything in the tier above, but with those three restrictions. That is unusually honest labelling and it should be read literally. A second person cannot be added to this tier at any price.

## The step that matters

Essentials to Growth is $64 per user per month on annual billing, which is the largest step in the ladder by a wide margin.

What it buys is automation: workflows, the AI assistant inside them, a power dialer, custom activities and bulk email^[1]. Neither of the two cheaper tiers has workflows of any kind.

If automation is why you are buying a CRM, your real entry price is $99 a user per month, not $9 and not $35. Everything below is a contact database with a phone attached.

The second bill: telephony

Calling and SMS are passed through at the underlying carrier's cost rather than marked up. The pricing page puts outbound calls at around two cents a minute and phone numbers at about a dollar a month^[1].

Two details change the arithmetic. Calls round up to the nearest whole minute, so a seventy-second call bills as two minutes^[5]. And sent messages carry published rates of three cents for multimedia sent and one cent received in the United States and Canada.

Then there are the registration fees, which appear nowhere on the pricing page. United States messaging requires a registered brand and campaign: one-time charges of $4 for a low-volume standard brand, $44 for a standard brand above six thousand messages a day, and $15 for campaign verification, plus a recurring $1.50 a month per campaign^[5].

None of those is large. All of them are invisible until the invoice arrives.

## The third bill: AI credits

Every tier includes an allowance per user: 500 on Solo, 1,000 on Essentials, 1,500 on Growth and 2,000 on Scale^[1]. They pool at account level, reset monthly, and do not carry over^[4].

Here is the part the pricing page omits. The per-user scaling stops at ten users. Additional users beyond that cap add no further included credits^[4].

Tier	Advertised per user	Account ceiling
Solo	500	500 (one user)
Essentials	1,000	10,000
Growth	1,500	15,000
Scale	2,000	20,000

A thirty-seat account on Growth receives 15,000 credits, not 45,000. At fifty seats it still receives 15,000. The pricing page states the per-user figure with no qualification anywhere near it.

Extra credits are sold as monthly subscriptions in seventeen bands running from $20 for 1,200 credits to $10,000 for a million. The price per credit falls from about 1.7 cents to one cent and then flattens completely. None of that appears on the pricing page, which says only that additional credits are available for purchase^[4].

And there is no spending cap of any kind: no global limit and no per-agent limit^[4]. Voice agent calls accrue both credits and telephony charges for their full connected duration, including silence.

The add-ons

Add-on	Price	Where it applies
Call Assistant	$50 a month plus $0.02 per transcribed minute	all tiers
Additional organizations	$50 per organization a month	Growth and Scale include one
Data enrichment	$0.05 per field, every time	ticked as included on all tiers

Call Assistant records, summarises and transcribes calls. Only calls longer than thirty seconds are transcribed, and the fee is charged once per billing account rather than per organization, which is a point on which the pricing page and the documentation disagree^[5].

Data enrichment is the one to watch. The comparison matrix shows it included on every tier with no qualification. It is metered at five cents per field each time, and the vendor's own documentation warns that bulk enrichment becomes expensive^[5].

## What a real account costs

Eight sales people on Growth, annual billing, each making calls for two hours a day. Twenty working days.

Line	Monthly
8 seats at $99	$792
Phone numbers, 8 at about $1	$8
Calling, 8 x 2 hours x 20 days at about $0.02 a minute	$384
Call Assistant, fee plus transcription	about $200
Total	about $1,384

The licence is 57% of that bill. The telephony and transcription are the rest, and neither of them appears on the pricing page as a number you can plan with.

That is not a criticism of pass-through billing. It is the fairer arrangement. It is an argument for modelling the usage before signing rather than after.

The discount nobody publishes

The vendor offers discounts for ten or more seats on a twelve-month commitment, and does not publish how much^[3]. The page refers the buyer to a sales conversation.

If you are at or near ten seats, that is a conversation to have before accepting the published rate, because the published rate is explicitly not the only one available.

## Multi-organization accounts

A detail that matters for agencies, holding companies and anyone running two businesses from one login.

Secondary organizations cost $50 each a month. The two upper tiers include one^[3].

The constraint is that linked organizations must all sit on the same plan and the same billing schedule^[3]. You cannot run one entity on the top tier and another on the cheap one. The whole group is priced by its most demanding member.

A shared user is billed once rather than per organization, which is the right way round.

Monthly or annual, tier by tier

The decision is not the same on every tier, and the badge invites you to treat it as though it were.

On Solo, annual billing saves 52.6%. Take it.

On Essentials it saves 28.6%, which is still a real return.

On Growth and Scale it saves 9.2% and 6.7%. Against that you are giving up the ability to leave mid-term, and monthly here carries no contract at all. For a team whose headcount moves, the discount on the upper tiers is not worth the commitment.

One asymmetry to know. A plan upgrade is prorated immediately. A credit subscription upgrade is not: you pay the full price of the new credit plan with no proration^[4].

What is not published

The annual total. The price of the Custom tier and the size of company it is meant for. The size of the ten-seat discount. Any seat minimum on the three multi-user tiers. Per-country telephony rates, which are the carrier's rather than the vendor's. And what the four predefined permission roles actually permit on the three tiers that carry them rather than customizable ones.

If you are already a customer

Three checks, in descending order of what they are likely to return.

Your seat count against the ten-user credit ceiling. If you are above ten seats, you have been buying credits you assumed were included. Work out what you actually consume and price the top-up bands against it^[4].

Your calling pattern against the rounding. Every call rounds up to a whole minute^[5]. A team making many short calls pays a meaningful premium on that rule alone, and the fix is operational rather than commercial.

Enrichment usage. It is metered at five cents a field every time, and the interface presents it as an included feature^[5]. Bulk actions across a list are the expensive case, and the vendor says so itself.

And one question for renewal rather than today: if you have reached ten seats, ask what the twelve-month discount is worth. It exists and its size is not published^[3].

## Before you sign

Count the calling minutes your team actually makes and price them at two cents, rounding each call up to a whole minute.

Count your seats against the ten-user credit ceiling, and if you are above it, ask what the extra credits will cost on your plan rather than assuming the per-user figure holds.

Ask what the ten-seat discount is worth for your team, in writing.

And check whether you need more than 250 custom fields or more than ten connected email accounts, because neither of those limits moves on any tier at any price.