Personio quietly moves Public API access out of Core and behind Core Pro
Six weeks after migrating its installed base to per-employee-per-month pricing, Personio removed Access to Public API from the Core plan's entitlements. The change is visible only in the comparison table on /pricing/ — bounded between the 2024-09-12 and 2024-10-08 snapshots — and Personio published no notice of it.
The Access and Permissions block of the plan comparison table carried exactly two exclusions against Core: Open Authorisation (OAuth) and the Okta / Microsoft Entra ID integrations. Access to Public API was ticked for both Core and Core Pro.
Three exclusions against Core in the same block, the new one sitting against Access to Public API. Integration via the public API becomes a Core Pro entitlement. In later revisions of the table the row disappears entirely and is replaced by Custom Integrations, likewise Core Pro-only.
This one is invisible unless you diff the table cell by cell, which is presumably the point.
Personio’s plan-comparison table renders an exclusion as a dash and an inclusion as an icon with no text, so the change only shows up as a change in the count of dashes inside the Access and Permissions block:
- 2024-09-12 —
Secure Login | Google Single Sign-on | Role-Based Data Access Control | Access to Public API | Open Autorisation (OAuth) | - | Okta and Microsoft Entra ID integrations | - |— two dashes, both after the identity-provider rows. The API row is ticked for Core. - 2024-10-08 —
... | Access to Public API | - | Open Autorisation (OAuth) | - | Okta and Microsoft Entra ID integrations | - |— three dashes, the new one immediately after the API row.
The rendered screenshot of the 2024-09-12 snapshot confirms the reading: two blue check marks on the Access to Public API row, and dashes only on OAuth and Okta / Entra ID. The 2024-08-27 capture — taken hours before the repricing notices went live — shows the same two-dash state, so Core had API access right up to the migration.
Why it counts as a price change. Personio’s Core Pro upgrade is a cap-removal, not a feature bundle: unlimited legal entities, unlimited document storage, unlimited e-signatures. Moving the API into it changes the character of the upgrade for one specific buyer — the customer who does not need any of those caps lifted but does need to integrate Personio with a data warehouse, an identity system or a bespoke internal tool. For them, the upgrade price became the price of an API key.
No announcement exists. The pricing-updates-v5 and pricing-updates-v6 migration pages, published 2024-08-27 and still online a year later, list four or five specific things a customer may object to. Loss of API access is not among them, and the pages describe no entitlement change to Core. Nothing in the help centre or the General Terms references it either. Existing customers on legacy entitlements may well have retained access — that is unverified — but the published offer to new buyers changed.
By the time /pricing/ was archived on 2026-04-17, the “Access to Public API” row had been removed from the table altogether. In its place sits Custom Integrations, dashed for Core and ticked for Core Pro — the same entitlement, relabelled, and now impossible to compare against the 2024 table without going to the archive.
The comparison table's Access and Permissions block carried exactly two exclusions on 2024-09-12 — Open Authorisation (OAuth) and the Okta / Microsoft Entra ID integrations — with Access to Public API ticked for both Core and Core Pro. By 2024-10-08 a third exclusion had appeared against Access to Public API itself, moving the API behind Core Pro. Bounded between those two snapshots. No announcement accompanied it, and the row was later replaced entirely by a Custom Integrations row that is likewise Core Pro-only.