Personio deletes its published per-employee rate card and its public cost calculator
Between 8 June and 25 September 2023, Personio removed the starting per-employee-per-month prices — Essential from €2.88 and Professional from €4.43 — and the interactive Calculate Your Costs tool from both /pricing/ and /preise/. Every plan card has read 'Book a demo' ever since. This is the date Personio went dark on price.
The pricing page carried a live rate card and a client-side quote calculator. Essential was labelled 'from €2.88 per month & employee', Professional 'from €4.43 per month & employee' (badged MOST POPULAR OPTION) and Enterprise 'Price upon request'. Below it, 'Calculate Your Costs' let any visitor pick a company-size band (0-25, 26-50, 51-75 … over 1000 employees), a billing cycle ('Yearly payment - You save 5%'), a plan, a Recruiting size, a Conversations plan, add-ons and unlimited e-signature, and read out a Fixed Monthly Cost. Implementation and Customer Service were both shown as 'Price on demand'.
Two plan cards, Core and Core Pro, with a 'Book a demo' button where the price used to be, and no calculator. The only currency figure on any Personio-owned surface today is an AI-credit invoice-line example in the help centre.
Personio used to publish a price. Archived snapshots of www.personio.com/pricing/ show a starting per-employee-per-month rate on the page continuously from at least 2022-02-05 to 2023-05-27, and on the German twin www.personio.de/preise/ (as €2,88 and €4,43) as late as 2023-06-08. By the next archived capture of either page — 2023-09-25 for the English page, 2023-10-01 for the German one — the numbers and the calculator are gone and the plan cards have become Core and Core Pro.
The Internet Archive has no capture of /pricing/ between 2023-05-27 and 2023-09-25, so the change is bounded, not exact: it happened somewhere in that 121-day window. The window brackets 2023-08-08, the date Personio’s own help centre gives for the Core / Core Pro repackaging, and the two are almost certainly the same release.
Three details are worth keeping straight, because the “Personio used to be transparent” story is softer than it looks:
- The rates were “from” prices, not a rate card. The page said from €2.88 and from €4.43, and the calculator’s company-size dropdown made the actual figure a function of which band you fell into. A buyer could compute a number, but only the floor was published.
- Enterprise never had a price — it read “Price upon request” throughout the transparent era. So did Implementation and Customer Service, both permanently marked “Price on demand”. The one-time setup fee has been unpriced for the entire archived history of the page.
- The two rates never moved. €2.88 and €4.43 are byte-identical across every snapshot that carries them, from February 2022 to June 2023. Personio did not raise its published price and then hide it; it published one price for roughly eighteen months and then stopped publishing.
The residue of the deleted model is still in the live copy. Personio’s contract-and-pricing FAQ, captured 2026-06-14, still tells buyers that only active employees “influence the price and the size category necessary for your Personio plan” — the vocabulary of the company-size bands that the calculator used and that Personio publicly retired in August 2024.
Between the last snapshot carrying a price (2023-06-08 on personio.de/preise/) and the next snapshot of either page (2023-09-25 English, 2023-10-01 German), Personio removed every per-employee rate and the Calculate Your Costs tool. The 2023-09-25 page is headlined Upgrade Your People Operations, leads with a single Core panel plus an Apps grid in which Compensation and Surveys are still marked Coming Soon, and carries a demo-booking button in place of every price. The change is bounded, not exact — the Internet Archive has no capture of /pricing/ between 2023-05-27 and 2023-09-25 — and the window brackets the 2023-08-08 repackaging.