Why our cheapest plan is €199, and why it has to be

When we set the price list for Co-lega, we spent more time arguing about the bottom number than the top one. The top is easy: it scales with what a customer needs and what we deliver. The bottom is a values question. It says what we think the work is worth and who we're willing to do it for.

We thought about a €90 plan. We considered a €49 introductory tier. We could probably sell either one tomorrow. We didn't, and this post is the explanation.

What we noticed

The market for SMB front-of-house help splits cleanly into two segments, and the gap between them is bigger than it looks.

At the bottom, the chat-widget category. €19 to €49 a month, self-serve, you paste a script and write your own FAQ. The vendor is selling you software. Whether the agent on your site actually answers well is your problem.

At the top, the enterprise-AI category. Per-resolution pricing, multi-thousand-euro implementations, sales cycles that take a quarter. The vendor is selling you a platform. The work is real but the price floor is also real, and almost no Croatian or EU SMB qualifies.

In the middle, where most of the businesses we want to serve actually live, there's almost nothing. A 14-person webshop with €200,000 a year in online revenue is too big for a self-serve widget to do justice and too small for a per-resolution enterprise contract to make sense. The market is mostly leaving them alone.

We wanted to build the thing that fits there. The question was: at what price.

What we decided

We set the floor at €199 per month and made a deliberate choice not to sell anything cheaper.

The reason isn't margin. We could run a €90 plan profitably if we cut the work that goes into it. We just don't want to.

At €199, here's what fits inside the price:

• Someone runs the five-day setup with the customer. A real person, with a brief, a quality test, and a go-live they sign off on.
• Someone reads every transcript the agent produces, every month, and writes a short report on what worked and what didn't.
• When something the agent answered poorly turns up in those transcripts, someone fixes it. Not next quarter. The next week.
• When the customer's site or catalog changes, someone updates the knowledge the agent works from.
• When the customer escalates a question to us, someone replies the same business day.

That list is the price. Strip any of it out and we're back in the chat-widget category, and the chat-widget category is selling you software. We're selling you the part of a role that a human used to do at €1,500 to €3,500 a month. The arithmetic only works if we actually do the work.

At €90, we'd have to drop the monthly reading-the-transcripts pass. Or the setup pass. Or the same-day customer support. Pick any of those to drop and you're suddenly not paying for an employee, you're paying for a tool that someone is calling an employee for marketing reasons. We didn't want to do that, so we set the price at the point where we don't have to.

What the trade-off is

Every position has a cost. Ours has three.

We lose buyers whose first question is price. A real number we live with. The buyer who emails "do you have a cheaper plan" before asking what the role does is the buyer who won't be happy at €199 either. We say no, point them to Tidio or Crisp, and lose the sale honestly. This costs us deals we'd otherwise close on tools-tier expectations.

We don't reach the smallest businesses. A solo plumber with three inbound calls a week shouldn't pay €199 a month. We know it. The fractional-hire arithmetic doesn't work for him; he should answer the chat himself or use a free Crisp inbox. We're not the right tool for businesses below a volume threshold, and we say so.

We're outside the SaaS instinct of "free trial, upgrade later." No €0 plan. No 14-day trial that costs us nothing. The buyer can see a live agent we built for another customer, and they can request a demo call and talk to us, but they can't self-serve their way to a working agent for free. This is a real friction. We accept it because the alternative is shipping unsupervised agents and that breaks the value we're claiming.

What we'd change our mind on

Two things would move the floor.

If the setup work compressed below 4 hours of our time. Right now a clean five-day setup costs us about 12 to 18 staff-hours total. If we got that down to 4, we could honestly offer a Light plan at €90 that includes setup but skips the monthly review cycle. We'd label it clearly: "do it yourself after we install it." The day that becomes true, we'd open the lower tier.

If we built a way to do the monthly transcript review at fractional staff cost. Today the review is a senior operator on our team reading every conversation. If we built a strong enough system to surface the things that need attention without missing the things that matter, we'd add a Self-Serve plan around €99. The day the quality of attention doesn't drop, we ship it.

Neither of those is true yet. When they are, we'll move. We're naming the conditions out loud because that's how you should evaluate a vendor's pricing: ask them what would change their mind. If the answer is "nothing, this is just how we price," that's a different posture than ours.

What this means for you

If you're an SMB owner reading this and the €199 floor felt high at first glance, here's the way to test it for your business.

Take the cost of the leads or customers you're currently missing per week. Pick the smallest defensible estimate. Multiply by 52. Divide that annual number by 12. If the result is over €200, the floor is below your real cost of doing nothing. If it's not, you're below the volume threshold we're built for and we'll tell you that on the demo call.

We'd rather lose a sale than ship the wrong tool. The position holds in both directions: we lose the buyer who wants €39, and we lose the buyer who's too small to justify €199. Both kinds walking away is how we know the price is doing its job.

How to try it

If you want to see the work that justifies the floor before you commit, click through the live demo. It's a real agent for a real Croatian van-rental shop, built in the same five-day setup window we'd run for you.

When you're ready to talk, request a demo. The first 15 minutes are an honest conversation about whether the floor sits below your real cost of missing leads. If it doesn't, we'll tell you, and we'll point you somewhere cheaper.

For the broader argument on why front-of-house is the new fractional category, the previous post makes the case. For what the cheap tier is actually good at and where it stops, the comparisons post goes through it.