Teamwork.com has five plans and publishes a price for two of them. That sentence is most of what you need to know about budgeting for it, but it is not the part that catches people out. The part that catches people out is that seat count does not choose your plan. Feature gates do, and two of those gates are counters most buyers never check.
Real and tiered rather than a label: AI Essentials, comment summaries, a project wizard and a task builder from Basics; an AI utilization summary at Accelerate; AI smart assign and profitability forecasting at Optimize; plus an MCP server that names Claude and ChatGPT. Held back by three things the vendor states itself — two features still marked coming soon, an introductory free period with no published credit price, and two different launch dates for billing in its own material.
The free tier is unusually generous for this category — Gantt, time tracking and billable flags cost nothing — and Basics at $9.99/seat/mo billed annually is competitive. But seat minimums of three and five raise the real floor above the headline, and the capabilities that justify choosing Teamwork over a cheaper general-purpose tool concentrate in Accelerate and in Optimize, which carries no published price at all.
118 capabilities documented on the vendor's own pages, and the professional-services layer is deeper than general PM tools reach: billable rates with retrospective changes, personal and company timesheets with approval, expenses against budgets, time and financial and fixed-fee budgets, invoicing from logged time, multi-currency billing, profitability reporting, utilization targets, resource scheduling by skill and capacity placeholders. The ordinary work-management set is complete on every plan, free included.
Scored on structural evidence rather than reviewer testimony, which we do not hold for this product: one-click project import from Wrike, Asana, Basecamp, ClickUp, Trello and monday.com lowers the switching cost, and the full view set plus time tracking on the free plan means the core workflow can be tested before purchase. Against that, the complexity is concentrated where the money is — rates, budgets, retainers and utilization — and the custom-workflow cap of one on Basics and three on Accelerate forces process decisions early.
150+ integrations claimed, and the ones that matter are named per tier rather than left vague: Harvest and both calendars on the free plan; HubSpot, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, Xero, QuickBooks and FreshBooks at Accelerate; Salesforce and NetSuite at Optimize. The MCP server is a current capability rather than a rebrand, and file linking from Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive starts at Basics. API rate limits scale by plan, 150 to 500 requests a minute.
Four sources on file, and the spread is the signal rather than the average: 3.3 out of 5 from 69 reviews at the low end against 4.4 from 1,343 and 4.5 from 941 in the two large pools. Reads as a product that satisfies most buyers and disappoints a minority sharply. The figures come from search results rather than rendered review pages, because the major aggregators block automated reading.
The raw material is better than most vendors publish — a plan comparison matrix with explicit per-tier cells, and a machine-readable pricing file served for AI agents. It is undermined by its own staleness: SAML SSO, the Optimize seat minimum, when quotes unlock and the AI billing date each get two different answers across vendor pages, and a live support article still describes plans named Deliver, Grow and Scale, which no longer exist.
SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 stated, data residency in the US or the EU on AWS, automatic database snapshots every few seconds, an uptime goal above 99.9%, and two-factor authentication plus role-based permissions on every plan. Live chat and email support from Basics; premium support and a dedicated success manager are Enterprise only. One hard limit stated by the vendor: Single Log Out via SAML is not supported.
Weighted across the axes above (weights reflect what actually drives the decision in this category). How we score →
The Published Prices
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Seat rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Forever | $0 | $0 | Maximum 5 users |
| Basics | $9.99/user/mo | $13.99/user/mo | Minimum 3 users |
| Accelerate | $24.99/user/mo | $29.99/user/mo | Minimum 5 users |
| Optimize | "Let's talk" | "Let's talk" | Not published on the pricing page |
| Enterprise | "Let's talk" | "Let's talk" | Not published |
The page loads on annual billing, and the vendor advertises the saving as "Save 29%"[1]. That figure is accurate on Basics: $13.99 down to $9.99 is 28.6%. It is considerably less accurate on Accelerate, where $29.99 down to $24.99 is 16.7%. The word doing the work is "up to".
Both paid tiers carry a seat minimum, and this is where the headline price stops describing your invoice. Basics starts at three users, so the smallest Basics bill is $29.97 a month on annual billing rather than $9.99. Accelerate starts at five, so its floor is $124.95 a month. If you are a two-person studio comparing per-seat prices across vendors, compare the floors instead.
Key takeaway — Multiply before you compare. The entry price on Accelerate is $24.99, but the entry invoice is five seats — $124.95 a month billed annually, whatever your headcount.
Basics allows one custom workflow and Accelerate three. Four distinct approval paths — creative briefs, bug reports, client change requests, internal requests — puts you at Optimize on a counter, not on a seat price. Check this first; it is the gate least likely to be noticed and the most likely to decide the plan.
Why Seat Count Does Not Pick Your Plan
Most pricing pages in this category are built so that team size walks you up the ladder: a free tier for two people, a cheap tier for ten, a mid tier for fifty. Teamwork is not built that way, and the Real-Cost Explorer that appears on other pricing pages on this site is deliberately absent here, because a slider keyed to seat count would give you the wrong answer.
Here is why. Basics has a minimum of three seats and no published maximum. Accelerate has a minimum of five and no published maximum. So a team of eight can sit on either one, and the thing that moves it from one to the other is not a headcount threshold. It is whether the team needs billable rates, timesheets and invoicing. The same is true one rung up: nothing about having forty people pushes you to Optimize. Needing project profitability does.
That makes the budgeting exercise a feature audit rather than a headcount calculation, and it makes two counters more important than the seat price.
The Two Counters That Decide Your Plan
Custom workflows. One on Basics. Three on Accelerate. Unlimited from Optimize. This is the tightest gate in the whole price list and the one least likely to be checked. If your intake process routes creative briefs, bug reports, client change requests and internal requests through four distinct approval paths, that is four workflows, and no amount of seats or automation volume will get you a fourth on Accelerate.
Proofs. Five a month on Free Forever, 20 on Basics, unlimited from Accelerate. For a studio that cycles client creative through review weekly, 20 proofs is roughly five pieces of work a week with no revisions. This is the cap most likely to move a small, otherwise-happy Basics team up to Accelerate for reasons that have nothing to do with the financial layer.
Automation actions matter too, but they are generous enough to be a secondary concern for most teams: 100 a month on Free, 5,000 on Basics, 20,000 on Accelerate, 100,000 on Optimize and Enterprise. The detail worth noting is that these are account-level monthly allowances, not per-seat quotas. A ten-person team on Basics shares 5,000 actions between them rather than getting 50,000. Several competitors meter per seat, so this is a comparison that needs converting before it means anything.
| Counter | Free Forever | Basics | Accelerate | Optimize | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active projects | 5 | 300 | 600 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Custom workflows | — | 1 | 3 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Proofs per month | 5 | 20 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Automation actions per month | 100 | 5,000 | 20,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 |
| File storage | 100MB | 100GB | 250GB | 500GB | 1,000GB |
| API requests per minute | 150 | 150 | 150 | 300 | 500 |
| Project templates | 2 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
On Basics, $13.99 monthly down to $9.99 annual is 28.6%. On Accelerate, $29.99 down to $24.99 is 16.7%. The advertised figure is a maximum, so compute the annual saving on the tier you are actually buying rather than trusting the badge.
Storage Has Its Own Rules
Three mechanics sit behind the storage column, and two of them work in your favour.
A single uploaded file caps at 2GB. A proof file caps at 105MB. But the vendor states that proof files do not count against your storage allowance[2]. For a creative team that is the opposite of the usual trap: the files you cycle through client review, which are the big ones, are not the files eating your quota.
And when you do hit the ceiling, extra storage is sold in 500GB increments added to the subscription. So the 100GB on Basics is a line item to extend rather than a wall that forces a tier jump. Price that increment with sales before assuming a storage ceiling means an upgrade.
A single file caps at 2GB and a proof file at 105MB, but the vendor states proofs do not count against the storage allowance. Extra storage is sold in 500GB increments, so a storage ceiling is a line item rather than a forced upgrade — price the increment before assuming you need the next tier.
Basics, $9.99/seat/mo billed annually. Everything on the free plan, plus the reporting layer: project status, burndown reports, project and portfolio health, planned-versus-actual comparison, and logged-versus-estimated time per project and per user. This is also where Teamwork's AI starts: comment summaries, a project wizard, a task builder, AI expense categorization, along with webhooks, the document editor, file linking from Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive, custom branding, and live chat and email support. Unlimited client users arrive here too.
Accelerate, $24.99/seat/mo billed annually. The billing engine. Billable user rates, retrospective rate changes, personal and company-wide timesheets, expenses logged against a budget, the Workload Planner with live capacity, time budgets at task-list level, basic invoices built from logged time, basic quotes, reminders to log time, formula fields, critical path in Gantt, and an AI utilization summary. Integrations step up as well: HubSpot, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, Xero, QuickBooks and FreshBooks. Custom domain and custom CSS are here.
Optimize, price not published. The profitability layer. Project profitability, financial budgets rather than time budgets, fixed-fee budgets, multi-currency billing, timesheet review and approval, resource scheduling across projects and people, capacity placeholders, planning around public holidays and time off, scheduling by skill, billable utilization targets per user, advanced dashboards, custom reports, scheduled reports, AI smart assign and AI profitability forecasting. Salesforce and NetSuite connect here. API headroom triples to 300 requests a minute.
Enterprise, price not published. Dedicated infrastructure, premium support, a dedicated customer success manager, 1,000GB of storage, 500 API requests a minute, and 10 hours of technical services. On the AI side the vendor's own page repeats Optimize's list verbatim under the heading "Everything in Accelerate plus", so Enterprise does not appear to add AI capability over Optimize.
Key takeaway — Accelerate tells you what the work cost. Optimize tells you whether it made money. If the second question is the one your leadership asks, the published rate card stops being useful and you are in a quote.
The AI Line Item That Does Not Exist Yet
Teamwork's AI is included in every paid plan right now, and the vendor is explicit that this is temporary: AI is included "for an introductory period", with usage-based AI credits launching later. The launch date is given inconsistently in the vendor's own material: November 2026 on the pricing page, September 2026 in the machine-readable pricing file it publishes for AI agents.
The price of those credits is not published anywhere. So every total-cost model for Teamwork that includes its AI features has a known expiry date and an unknown successor. If the AI layer is part of why you are buying, ask for the credit pricing in writing before you sign an annual term, because the annual term will outlive the introductory period.
AI is included in all paid plans «for an introductory period», with usage-based credits launching later — November 2026 on the pricing page, September 2026 in the vendor's own machine-readable pricing file. Credit prices are not published, so a second-year total cannot be estimated from the public page.
Five items sit outside the plan prices, and none of them carries a figure:
| Item | What it is |
|---|---|
| Advanced Security | IP-based access policy, email-domain restriction on invitations, configurable automatic session logout. Setup for the IP and domain rules goes through the vendor's security team by email |
| Onboarding services | Structured implementation support |
| Teamwork Connect | BI tool connection and custom dashboards built on Teamwork data |
| Premium support | Priority access to support, listed as included at Enterprise |
| Desk | Ticketing alongside project work |
The Advanced Security add-on is the one with a budgeting consequence beyond its own cost. SAML single sign-on appears as an Enterprise feature in the plan comparison matrix and as part of this add-on, purchasable on any paid per-user subscription, in the vendor's knowledge base[3]. Those are two different plans and two different bills for the same requirement. Get the answer in writing.
Billing Mechanics Worth Reading Before You Sign
Annual subscriptions are prepaid and run the full term, with no mid-term exit; the vendor's stated route is to decline renewal before the next annual billing date. Monthly subscriptions carry no long-term commitment and can be cancelled at any time, remaining active to the end of the current period.
Changes are asymmetric in the usual direction: upgrades, added users and add-on purchases take effect immediately, while downgrades, removed users and moves to a lower plan take effect at the start of the next billing cycle or at renewal. Monthly subscriptions can be paid by Visa, MasterCard or Maestro; annual subscriptions can additionally be paid by bank transfer.
The free trial is 14 days with no card required, and it covers the paid plans. That makes it the right place to test the two counters above before committing to a year.
What Teamwork Does Not Publish
- Any price for Optimize or Enterprise. Not a figure, not a "starting from".
- The seat range for Optimize and Enterprise. The pricing page says "Contact us"; the support documentation lists a five-user minimum for Optimize, which is a second answer to the same question.
- A maximum seat count on Basics or Accelerate. Only the minimums are published.
- Any add-on price, including Advanced Security, onboarding, Connect, Premium support and Desk.
- The price of AI credits after the introductory period, or the real date they start.
- What the 10 hours of technical services on Enterprise cost if you need the eleventh.
- Whether prices include tax. The page does not say.
How to Build the Number
Four steps, in this order, because the order is what keeps the estimate honest.
- Count your workflows and your monthly proof volume. If either exceeds one workflow or 20 proofs, Basics is out regardless of price, and your floor is Accelerate at five seats.
- Decide whether you need to answer the margin question, meaning whether a given project made money. If yes, you are pricing Optimize, which means a sales call, and the public page is background reading rather than a budget.
- Apply the seat minimum, not your headcount. Three on Basics, five on Accelerate.
- Add the expiry. Write down that AI is free for an introductory period and that the credit price is unpublished, so the second-year number is not the first-year number.
For a six-person agency that bills time and needs invoicing: Accelerate, six seats, $149.94 a month on annual billing, plus whatever Advanced Security costs if SSO is required, plus an unknown AI line from late 2026. For the same agency needing profitability reporting: a quote, and no way to estimate it from the page.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Teamwork.com cost per month?+
Basics is $9.99 per user per month billed annually, or $13.99 billed monthly, with a three-seat minimum — so $29.97 a month at the floor. Accelerate is $24.99 billed annually or $29.99 monthly, with a five-seat minimum, so $124.95 at the floor. Free Forever is $0 for up to five users. Optimize and Enterprise carry no published price.
Which Teamwork plan do I need?+
Seat count will not tell you, because Basics and Accelerate overlap above five seats. Three questions decide it: how many distinct custom workflows your intake needs (one on Basics, three on Accelerate, unlimited from Optimize), how many client proofs you run a month (20 on Basics, unlimited above), and whether you need billable rates and invoicing (Accelerate) or project profitability and multi-currency billing (Optimize).
Is there a free plan, and is it usable?+
Free Forever allows a maximum of five users and five active projects, with 100MB of storage across the account, 100 automation actions a month, two project templates and five proofs. The view set is complete — list, table, Gantt and Kanban — and time tracking with billable flags is included, which is unusual for a free tier. Treat it as a way to validate the workflow, not as an operating plan.
What does Teamwork's AI cost?+
Nothing right now, and an unpublished amount later. The vendor states AI is included in all paid plans for an introductory period, with usage-based AI credits launching afterwards. Its own pages give two different launch dates — November 2026 on the pricing page and September 2026 in the machine-readable pricing file — and the credit price appears nowhere.
Are there add-ons on top of the plan price?+
Five, and none has a published price: Advanced Security (IP access policy, email-domain restriction, automatic session logout), onboarding services, Teamwork Connect for BI dashboards, Premium support, and Desk for ticketing. Advanced Security matters most for budgeting, because SAML single sign-on is listed both as an Enterprise feature in the plan matrix and as part of this add-on on any paid plan in the knowledge base.
What happens if I add or remove users mid-term?+
Upgrades, added users and add-on purchases take effect immediately. Downgrades, removed users and moves to a lower plan take effect at the start of the next billing cycle or at renewal. Annual subscriptions are prepaid for the full term with no mid-term exit — the vendor's route is to decline renewal before the next annual billing date. Monthly subscriptions can be cancelled at any time.
- [1] vendor pricing page, read from the US (2026-10) https://www.teamwork.com/pricing/
- [2] vendor support: file size limits, including the proof-storage statement (2026-10) https://support.teamwork.com/projects/files/file-size-limits
- [3] vendor support: Advanced Security add-on, including the SAML plan question (2026-10) https://support.teamwork.com/projects/security/teamwork-advanced-security-add-on
- [4] Teamwork.com — official site https://www.teamwork.com
- [5] Teamwork.com support — plan and feature comparison matrix https://support.teamwork.com/projects/subscription/price-plan-feature-comparison