15Five pricing

About

15Five is a performance-management platform for HR teams — weekly check-ins, 1-on-1s, OKRs, performance reviews, engagement surveys and manager coaching, sold as one suite to people-operations buyers. Its own pricing page claims over 3,000 customer organisations covering 250,000 employees, and its comparison content positions it head-on against Lattice, Culture Amp and general HRIS suites.

The company has grown mostly by acquisition and repackaging rather than by adding meters. Engagement measurement arrived when 15Five bought Emplify for $50 million in April 2021; the AI manager coach arrived when it bought Kona in January 2025. Each acquisition became a new line on the price card within months, which is why the card has been restructured four times since 2021 while the underlying unit — one seat, one month, billed annually — has never changed.

The current product story is agentic. In June 2026 15Five shipped a Context Layer and a set of Agents that read performance data plus work signals from Slack, Teams, Jira, Asana and Google Calendar. Those ship inside the Perform tier at no extra charge today, and 15Five has written the terms that would let it charge for them later. For the pricing question, visit 15Five’s pricing page.

Pricing summary : How 15Five’s pricing model works

15Five prices one thing — a seat — and then sells six things next to it. The platform comes in three published per-user-per-month tiers billed annually: Engage at $4, Perform at $11 and Total Platform at $16, where Total Platform is simply Engage plus Perform plus manager-training microlearnings and carries the “Most Popular” ribbon. There is no monthly option on the card and no usage meter anywhere in the model.

What makes this different: the add-on layer does not share the platform’s unit. Kona Meeting Assistant bills per employee, Kona Coach and Content bill per manager, Compensation bills per user, and live coaching abandons recurring billing entirely for a $399 prepaid credit. A single 15Five contract can therefore carry four different population counts on one invoice.

• Platform seats — Engage $4, Perform $11, Total Platform $16 per user per month, annual billing only.
• Manager-population add-ons — Content at $49 per manager per month, Kona Coach at $19 per manager per month.
• Whole-company add-on — Kona Meeting Assistant at $2 per employee per month.
• Compensation module — $9 per user per month, or $11 per user per month with Mercer salary benchmarking.
• Coaching credits — $399 per credit; one 1:1 session consumes one credit, one group session consumes five, and up to 10 people may join a group session.
• AI — AMAYA, AI-Assisted Reviews and 15Five Agents are bundled into Perform at no separate charge; Kona is the only AI that carries its own price.

Pricing by product

Platform (per-seat tiers)

Manager Products (add-on)

Kona AI (add-on)

Compensation (add-on)

Sales motions across products: sales-led for every published tier and add-on — all three plan buttons open a demo request and each add-on card says “Let’s chat”; a self-serve trial and in-app plan upgrade still exist but are not linked from the pricing page.

Hidden costs : What 15Five users actually pay

The published rate is the easy part. What moves a 15Five invoice is the seat-ratchet in the contract and the fact that four add-ons count four different populations.

The seat count only goes up. 15Five’s Master Subscription Agreement fixes the maximum number of user seats in the order form and then states that user seats may only be increased during the term. Reductions require at least 30 days’ notice and take effect only at a renewal. The help centre spells out the cash consequence: new people fill purchased-but-empty seats first, extra seats above that are prorated from the activation date and billed on the monthly anniversary, and deactivating someone frees nothing — 15Five does not offer refunds or credits for people deactivated mid-subscription, whether or not a seat is assigned to anyone.

Renewal is repriced, not rolled over. The agreement auto-renews for a period equal to the initial term unless either side gives 30 days’ notice, and renewed services are subject to 15Five’s current pricing as of the renewal date. There is no cap and no price-lock language. 15Five also reserves the right to non-renew a customer outright over “outdated pricing/product structures” — the clean legal mechanism for retiring a legacy rate.

Coaching credits expire on 15Five’s calendar. The Transform addendum still governing the coaching line offers the scheduled live sessions once a month during the subscription term and says they will not carry over for any unused months. Prepaid capacity that resets monthly is breakage by design.

A worked example, for a 200-employee company with 25 managers on Total Platform with the full add-on set — every figure below is derived from the published rates, not quoted by 15Five:

At that shape the platform seat is 39% of the bill and the add-ons are 61% of it — and the two most expensive add-on lines, Content and Compensation, are the two with no AI in them at all.

Third-party procurement trackers and G2 reviewers commonly report that 15Five reads expensive relative to alternatives and that advanced reporting sits behind higher tiers; those are second-hand and 15Five publishes no discount schedule, so treat them as directional rather than as rates.

Want to estimate your own 15Five bill? Use the 15Five pricing calculator to model your costs based on seat counts and add-ons.

Pricing evolution : 15Five pricing history and changes

Cadence

Tracked range: 2019–present, from Wayback Machine snapshots of the pricing page.

Notable changes

• 2019-01-29 — BASIC at $7 and PLUS at $14 per person per month, billed annually. A customer success manager and priority live chat were footnoted as “Available with a $10K minimum contract” — the last time 15Five published a spend floor.
• 2021-04-27 — Emplify acquired for $50 million, the deal behind the standalone Engage product.
• 2021-11-18 — The card becomes modular: Engage $4, Perform $8, Focus $8, Total Platform $14, plus Transform Education at $99 per manager per month.
• 2022-06-29 — Transform becomes a ladder: Online $99, Hybrid $174, Live $300 per manager per month, with live coaching delivered to cohorts of 10 or 30 managers.
• 2023-05-15 — The last snapshot showing a self-serve “Try it Free” path on the pricing page. By January 2024 every CTA is a demo request.
• 2024-01-20 — Focus disappears; Perform rises $8 to $10 and Total Platform $14 to $16. Manager training splits into Transform $99 and Transform Accelerator $220. The AI brand on the card is “Spark AI”.
• 2024-12-02 — Coaching leaves per-manager pricing for $399 per credit; Compensation appears at $9 per user per month; Spark AI vanishes from the card.
• 2025-01-28 — Kona acquired; launched as a 15Five product at 15Five Next in May 2025.
• 2025-06-17 — Kona priced at $29 per manager per month; Content drops from $99 to $49.
• Between 2025-06-17 and 2025-12-07 — The largest single repackage since Emplify: Perform moves $10 to $11, Kona splits into a $2 per-employee meeting assistant and a $19 per-manager coach, Compensation gains a benchmarking SKU, the benchmarking partner changes from Comprehensive to Mercer, the Transform brand leaves the card, and the “How much does 15Five cost?” FAQ that restated every price is deleted. No snapshot exists inside that window, so the exact date is unverified.
• 2026-02-09 — A new FAQ entry, “Is there a minimum spend?”, appears and declines to name one.
• 2026-03-09 — AMAYA joins the Perform card.
• 2026-04-11 — The “Updated February 2026” freshness stamp appears on the page — two months after the date it claims.
• 2026-06-09 — 15Five Agents, the Context Layer, Focus Briefs and work-system integrations launch inside Perform at no additional cost.

What’s unique : 15Five’s distinctive pricing mechanics

1. A usage meter that exists only in the contract. 15Five sells no metered product. Yet its Context Layer Additional Terms of Service reserve the right to introduce fees for Agents “as a flat fee, on a per-user basis, based on usage or volume of workflow executions (i.e., the number of Agent runs initiated by or on behalf of Customer during a given period), or a combination thereof”. The mechanism is fully specified — 45 days’ written notice before a renewal term, and a customer’s failure to give timely non-renewal notice counts as acceptance of the new fee. 15Five has written the meter’s legal plumbing years before shipping the meter.

2. Four populations on one invoice. Most per-seat vendors bill every line against the same headcount. 15Five bills the platform per user, Content and Kona Coach per manager, Kona Meeting Assistant per employee, and coaching per prepaid credit. When Kona moved from $29 per manager to $2 per employee plus $19 per manager in late 2025, the headline number fell while the billable base for half the product expanded from the manager population to the entire company.

3. AI is deliberately split down the middle. The AI a buyer expects to be a premium upsell — AMAYA, AI-Assisted Reviews, Agents — is folded into the $11 Perform tier at no charge, and even the work-system integrations that feed it are stated as included at no additional cost. The AI that carries a price is the acquired one: Kona. Building AI into the tier while charging for the AI you bought is a coherent strategy, and it is the opposite of the credit-overlay pattern most incumbents chose.

Strengths & weaknesses

Billing UX : 15Five billing controls and transparency

• Billing Portal — reached from the settings gear via Company Settings, the Billing tab, then “Manage billing details”, which opens the portal in a new tab. Account Admin or Billing Admin role required; support must grant Billing Admin.
• Invoice tab — invoices download as PDFs and carry four fields: Activity (the subscription and its service period), Qty (seats on the line), Rate (cost per seat for the subscription length) and Subtotal, calculated as Qty times Rate times Service Period.
• Only open invoices are surfaced — the portal shows open invoices; a copy of a previously paid invoice requires contacting 15Five support with the expected date and amount.
• Payment methods — add a card by number, expiry and CVC, toggle “Set as default card”, and manage or delete existing cards from a three-dot menu. A failed charge surfaces a “Your last credit card transaction failed” banner.
• Self-serve upgrade, no self-serve downgrade — Account and Billing Admins can pick a higher plan from Company Settings and confirm; features enable immediately and the billing contact is emailed a receipt. The help centre’s downgrade instruction is an empty cross-reference, and plan-change requests are otherwise routed to support.
• Kona Usage Report — a 30-day rolling view showing Kona seats purchased against seats currently assigned, alongside adoption and setup status per manager. It is the only place in the product where entitlement consumption is visible.
• Seat behaviour is documented, not controlled — the help centre explains that empty paid seats fill first and that extra seats bill on the monthly anniversary, but there is no spend cap, budget alert or seat-threshold control described anywhere.

Strategic wins : Why 15Five’s pricing decisions worked

1. Publishing the whole card in a category that hides it

Workday publishes no dollar figure anywhere. BambooHR, Deel and Rippling publish partial cards and route the rest through quotes. 15Five publishes all three platform rates and all six add-on rates on one page, which makes it the cheapest company in its category to evaluate. In a market where buyers arrive already frustrated by opacity, a complete card is a top-of-funnel asset — it earns the “15Five pricing” search that competitors cede. See choosing the right usage metric for why unit clarity converts.

2. Turning coaching from a seat into a credit

Coaching was sold per manager per month at $99, then $174, then $300, then $220. Every one of those forced the buyer to license a whole manager population for a service most managers would consume irregularly. Moving to $399 per credit in December 2024 matched the charge to the event — one session, one credit — and let a customer buy coaching for six managers instead of sixty. It is the single most usage-shaped decision 15Five has made, and it arrived by shrinking the unit rather than by adding a meter. Related: how AI companies structure pricing.

3. Bundling the agentic layer instead of surcharging it

The obvious 2026 move was an AI credit pack bolted onto the seat. 15Five did the opposite: Agents, Focus Briefs, the Context Layer and the work-system integrations that feed them all ship inside the existing $11 Perform tier at no additional cost. That defends the tier against the churn risk of an AI surcharge while the terms quietly preserve the option to price it later — optionality without the immediate price objection. See outcome-based pricing trends for the alternative path.

Areas to improve : Gaps in 15Five’s pricing approach

1. The card publishes rates it will not sell

Every price is visible and none of them is buyable. All three plan buttons resolve to the demo form, every add-on says “Let’s chat”, and the help centre’s own plan article ends with a line telling the reader that per-seat pricing is not published there and to contact an account representative — on a product whose public page publishes exactly that. A self-serve signup and a 14-day trial both still work, and the contract still contemplates buying online by credit card on a monthly term, but neither is reachable from the page a buyer lands on. The result is the worst of both models: the transparency cost of publishing without the conversion benefit of selling.

2. Disclosure has moved backwards while the product moved forwards

Until mid-2025 the pricing FAQ answered “How much does 15Five cost?” by restating all three rates. That entry is gone. In its place, since February 2026, sits “Is there a minimum spend?” — answered by saying packages are flexible and that an account executive will explain which minimums apply. A question about a floor, answered by declining to name the floor, is the same disclosure regression that pushes buyers toward procurement trackers. See bill shock and cost unpredictability.

3. The seat ratchet has no counterweight

Seats can only be increased mid-term. Deactivations earn no credit. Renewal happens automatically at whatever 15Five’s current pricing is on the renewal date, with a 30-day notice window and no cap. Coaching credits reset monthly with no carry-over. Individually each clause is standard; together they mean a customer that shrinks — exactly the customer an HR platform serves during a downturn — keeps paying its peak headcount until the anniversary and then faces an uncapped repricing. A published renewal-uplift cap, or credit for deactivated seats, would cost 15Five little and remove the main procurement objection to an annual-only contract.

Key takeaways

1. Publish the whole card or don’t publish at all. 15Five publishes nine rates and sells none of them online — the transparency is real but the funnel still ends in a demo form, so it buys goodwill rather than revenue.
2. The unit matters more than the number. Kona’s headline price fell from $29 to $19 while its meeting-assistant half moved onto a $2 per-employee base, expanding the billable population by roughly an order of magnitude at most companies.
3. A credit is a smaller unit, not a usage meter. Moving coaching to $399 per credit matched charge to consumption without any metering infrastructure — the cheapest way for a seat-based vendor to get usage-shaped.
4. Write the meter into the contract before you build it. 15Five’s Context Layer terms specify a per-workflow-execution fee, a 45-day notice period and silence-as-acceptance, years ahead of any meter existing.
5. Retire pricing through non-renewal. The right to decline renewal over “outdated pricing/product structures” is how a vendor with 3,000 customers and four repackages since 2021 keeps legacy rates from compounding.

UBP implications

1. Bundle the AI, reserve the meter. 15Five ships its agentic layer free inside a seat tier while contractually pre-authorising per-run pricing — a template for vendors who want AI adoption now and pricing power later.
2. Prepaid credits are the seat-based vendor’s on-ramp to usage pricing. They require no metering pipeline, no overage engine and no rev-rec change, yet they let a buyer pay for what they actually consume.
3. Mixed billing populations are a comprehension tax. Four different bases across six add-ons make the effective per-employee rate uncomputable from the card, which erodes the very transparency the published rates were meant to deliver. See choosing the right usage metric.

Sources

• 15Five pricing page (accessed 2026-09-10)
• 15Five Master Subscription Agreement (accessed 2026-09-10)
• 15Five Context Layer Additional Terms of Service (accessed 2026-09-10)
• 15Five Generative AI Additional Terms of Service (accessed 2026-09-10)
• What is included in each 15Five pricing plan? (accessed 2026-09-10)
• How does adding or removing people impact billing? (accessed 2026-09-10)
• Access and Download Invoices from the Billing Portal (accessed 2026-09-10)
• 15Five privacy policy, naming its payment processor (accessed 2026-09-10)
• 15Five sub-processor list (accessed 2026-09-10)
• 15Five product updates roadmap (accessed 2026-09-10)
• 15Five Acquires Kona, the AI-Powered Manager Effectiveness Coach for Remote Managers — published 2025-01-28 (accessed 2026-09-10)
• 15Five Announces Acquisition of Emplify for $50 Million — published 2021-04-27 (accessed 2026-09-10)
• Wayback Machine snapshots of 15five.com/pricing, 2019-01-29 through 2026-05-10

Bottom line

15Five is the most legible price card in HR performance software and the least buyable. Nine published rates, three seat tiers and six add-ons, all billed annually — and every single button opens a demo form. The mechanic worth watching is not the seat price but the clause underneath it: 15Five has already written the terms that let it charge per Agent run, with 45 days’ notice and silence counting as consent. The meter does not exist yet. The contract for it does.

Want to compare 15Five against other HR and people platforms? Browse the pricing blueprint.

Pricing timeline : Major events on a vertical axis

Each milestone below corresponds to a public pricing change, product launch, or material adjustment. Major events use a filled marker; minor adjustments use a faded one.

15Five Agents and the Context Layer ship inside Perform

Jun 2026

Agents, Focus Briefs and work-system integrations launched at no additional cost inside the Perform tier, governed by terms that reserve 15Five's right to price them per Agent run at a future renewal.

Kona unbundled onto an employee-wide seat, Perform rises to $11

Dec 2025

The single $29 per-manager Kona SKU split into Kona Meeting Assistant at $2 per employee per month and Kona Coach at $19 per manager per month, and Perform moved from $10 to $11.

Kona priced at $29 per manager, Content halved to $49

Jun 2025

Kona first carried a price on the pricing card at $29 per manager per month, while the on-demand manager content library dropped from $99 to $49 per manager per month.

Kona acquired

Jan 2025

15Five acquired Kona, an AI assistant and coach that joins managers' virtual meetings, and launched it as a 15Five product at its 15Five Next event in May 2025.

Live coaching moves from a per-manager seat to a per-credit pack

Dec 2024

The $220 per-manager Accelerator tier was replaced by coaching sold at $399 per credit, and a Compensation add-on appeared at $9 per user per month available on all packages.

Focus retired, Perform and Total Platform re-priced

Jan 2024

The Focus OKR SKU disappeared from the card, Perform moved from $8 to $10 and Total Platform from $14 to $16. Manager training kept a $99 tier with Transform Accelerator added at $220 per manager per month.

Four-SKU modular card replaces the two-tier ladder

Nov 2021

Engage at $4, Perform at $8 and Focus at $8 per user per month, with Total Platform at $14 as the bundle, alongside Transform Education at $99 per manager per month.

Emplify acquired for $50 million

Apr 2021

15Five bought engagement-measurement vendor Emplify, the deal that produced the standalone Engage SKU which first carried a $4 per-user price on the pricing page later that year.

Two published tiers and a $10K contract floor

Jan 2019

The card showed BASIC at $7 and PLUS at $14 per person per month billed annually, with an Enterprise band sold by phone. A customer success manager and priority live chat were footnoted as available only with a $10K minimum contract.