Float Charges $12/Seat, Runn Needs 20 Minimum: Build the $39 Flat-Fee Planner Agencies Need

The Problem & Opportunity

Small agencies and boutique consulting firms live in a strange gap: too complex for a spreadsheet, too small for Float, Runn, or Kantata. This report lays out the case for a lightweight resource capacity planner purpose-built for teams of 2-15 people, and exactly how to build, price, and sell it.

🎯 The Opportunity

Every boutique agency owner eventually hits the same wall. A spreadsheet tracked who was free for the first few clients. Then a fourth and fifth project landed at the same time, two people quietly burned out while a third sat idle, and nobody noticed until a deadline slipped. The natural next step is to look at the "resource planning" category, Float, Runn, Kantata, Resource Guru, and discover that every one of them was designed for a very different buyer: a 50-plus person agency or professional services firm with a dedicated ops person whose job is to manage the scheduling tool itself. The r/agency community captured this precisely: resource planning tools like Float, Runn, and Kantata are "powerful, but feel heavy and expensive for small teams," while generic PM tools like Asana, Jira, and ClickUp are "flexible, but you end up building your own system with custom fields, spreadsheets." That sentence is the entire opportunity in one line. There is a structural gap between "spreadsheet that breaks past three overlapping projects" and "enterprise PSA platform priced and designed for teams you don't have." A tool that does one thing, show who is over-booked and under-booked across overlapping client work, with zero setup overhead and a flat price that does not punish a team for adding its fifth or tenth person, is the product this report builds a case for. The market validation is not theoretical: multiple independent Reddit threads across r/agency, r/consulting, r/projectmanagement, r/SaaS, and r/Entrepreneurs, spanning different years and different communities, all converge on the same complaint and the same workaround behavior, including at least one team that chose to build its own internal tool (Supervisible) rather than buy anything on the market today.

This is not a niche, one-off complaint confined to a single thread or a single year. Pulling the evidence together, the same shape of complaint appears in r/agency (teams evaluating an all-in-one tool for agency work), r/consulting (a team that built Supervisible rather than buy), r/projectmanagement (three separate threads, one about going down the rabbit hole of resource tools, one about a team that outgrew Float, one comparing specific tools like Resource Guru and Float directly), r/SaaS (a small-agency owner who settled on BigTime after finding other tools too heavy or too generic), and r/Entrepreneurs (a thread stating plainly that most small agencies start with spreadsheets, and that spreadsheets stop working once projects start overlapping). Five different communities, independently, over roughly a year, describing the same gap in nearly identical language is a far stronger signal than a single viral post, because it suggests the pain is structural to the segment rather than a passing frustration with one specific vendor.

👤 Ideal Customer Profile

The buyer is the owner or operations lead at a boutique creative, development, or consulting agency with 2 to 15 people, billing clients by the hour or by project, who currently tracks who's doing what in a spreadsheet, a shared calendar, or inside a generic PM tool that was never built for capacity views. This person is not a dedicated resource manager, they are usually the founder or a generalist ops hire wearing five hats, which means the tool has to be usable in minutes, not after a week of onboarding. They are price-sensitive in a specific way: not unwilling to pay for software, but allergic to per-seat pricing models that make the bill grow every time they hire, because growing the bill every time headcount grows is exactly the pain Capterra reviewers flagged about Float, pricing that "scales quickly for larger teams and can be steep for smaller businesses." This buyer has typically already tried, and rejected, at least one of three paths: a free-tier PM tool stretched past its limits, a trial of Float or Runn that felt oversized for a six-person team, or a DIY spreadsheet with conditional formatting that someone has to manually update every Monday. They want one screen that answers "who is overloaded this week and who has room for the new client," nothing more, and they want it to cost roughly what one hour of billable time is worth per month, not a growing per-seat tax.

This buyer's job-to-be-done is narrower than it first appears: they are not trying to run their agency from inside the scheduling tool, they are trying to answer one question fast, repeatedly, without friction, "if I say yes to this new client starting Monday, who actually has room for it." Every feature that doesn't serve that single question directly, invoicing, time tracking, client portals, Gantt charts, is friction this buyer has already demonstrated, through their own words in the evidence, that they don't want to pay for or learn. That is also why a generic PM tool is not a good enough substitute even though it is cheaper or already paid for: the r/agency thread's own framing, "you end up building your own system with custom fields, spreadsheets," shows that the cost isn't the subscription price, it's the setup and maintenance labor of bolting a capacity view onto a tool that was never designed to show one.

🔥 Why Now

Three forces are converging right now. First, the incumbents are visibly drifting further from this buyer rather than closer to it: Toggl, whose standalone "Toggl Plan" product used to be the lightweight scheduling option small teams reached for, has merged Toggl Plan into a single bundled "Toggl" product where capacity management is now a separate paid add-on on top of the base per-user price, and Runn enforces a 20-seat minimum bill regardless of how many seats a team actually uses, which prices out almost every team in the 2-15 person band by design. Second, the demand signal is unusually persistent and self-reported: across nearly a dozen distinct Reddit threads in r/agency, r/consulting, r/projectmanagement, r/SaaS, and r/Entrepreneurs over roughly the past year, small firms are independently arriving at the same conclusion, the existing tools are "built for massive teams with way too much time on their hands," in the words of one r/projectmanagement thread, and are responding by stitching together workaround stacks (Trello plus Toggl Plan, ClickUp's capacity add-on, BigTime, Teamhood) or building internal tools from scratch. Third, the category leader closest to this segment, Float, has proven the model is fundable and durable without proving it is optimized for the smallest end of its own market: roughly $15M in revenue and 3,500-plus customers built over about 14 years is real traction, but it is traction built on a per-seat model that its own reviewers say punishes small teams, which is precisely the wedge a flat-fee, boutique-sized alternative can exploit before Float, Runn, or a new entrant closes that gap themselves.

It is also worth being explicit about what this report did not use to make the timing case. Broader market-sizing reports on the resource management software category exist (see Sources & References) covering the wider, enterprise-inclusive market, but none of the specific growth-rate or dollar-size figures from those reports were independently confirmed to the standard this report requires for a cited statistic, so they are listed as background context rather than cited as hard numbers. The timing case here rests deliberately on the qualitative, repeated, cross-community demand signal and the one verified revenue data point (Float's own trajectory) rather than on a secondary market-sizing estimate that could not be verified directly.

📊 Validation & Proof

The clearest proof is that the problem statement in this report is lifted almost verbatim from how the target buyer describes it themselves. In this r/agency discussion, an agency owner explicitly frames the gap between heavy resource-planning suites and DIY PM-tool hacks when asking for recommendations, language this report's problem statement draws directly from. In this r/consulting discussion, a commenter says their team uses Float but finds it "pretty expensive" for their liking and notes it can be gamed via overtime reporting, while another commenter reveals their team built an internal tool called Supervisible because nothing on the market hit the sweet spot between lightweight and powerful for their agency, direct evidence that paying customers of the existing leader are unhappy enough to build rather than buy. In this r/projectmanagement thread, the OP evaluated Float, Runn, and ClickUp's resource add-on and concluded most tools in the category are "built for massive teams with way too much time on their hands," turning capacity planning into what feels like a full-time job rather than a five-minute weekly check. In this r/projectmanagement thread, a team that outgrew Float is actively shopping for alternatives with better permissions and more flexible scheduling, which cuts the other way: the market pain exists at both ends of the size spectrum, and a boutique-focused tool needs a clear "you've outgrown us" exit story rather than pretending to serve every team size. On the revenue side, the strongest proof point is structural rather than anecdotal: Float's own reported trajectory of roughly $15M in revenue and over 3,500 customers after about 14 years (with third-party estimators placing the range anywhere from $7.8M to $36.1M) shows that even the single closest incumbent to this buyer has grown steadily but not explosively, which is consistent with a real but bounded market that a flat-fee alternative, under-pricing the per-seat model at the 2-15 person end specifically, can carve out profitably without needing to out-scale Float itself.

The Market

The competitive set splits cleanly into enterprise-leaning PSA platforms that are overpowered for this buyer and lighter tools that either weren't built for capacity planning or have drifted away from it.

🏆 Competitive Landscape

Float publishes its pricing directly at $7/scheduled-person/month for its Starter plan and $12/scheduled-person/month for Pro, with an Enterprise tier priced by custom contract; it bills per scheduled person rather than per seat, so unused "guest" access is free, but reviewers on Capterra note the per-person model "scales quickly for larger teams and can be steep for smaller businesses" even at the low end. Runn lists Lite at $7 and Standard at $11 per resource seat per month, but Runn enforces a 20-seat minimum bill, meaning a 6-person agency pays for 20 seats worth of licensing no matter how few people actually touch the tool, a structural mismatch for this exact buyer segment; Runn's Advanced tier is custom-quoted. Kantata has no publicly listed pricing at all, its own pricing page only offers a "request pricing" form tailored to company size and goals, and third-party sources confirm Kantata does not publish prices; it is positioned for mid-market and enterprise professional-services organizations, not 2-15 person teams, so for this report it is correctly treated as directionally relevant but not price-comparable. Resource Guru's confirmed entry tier, Grasshopper, is $4.16 per person per month on annual billing (plus $2.08 for non-human "other resources" like equipment or meeting rooms), the cheapest confirmed price point in the dedicated scheduling category; its higher Blackbelt and Master tiers were not fully visible on the official pricing page at fetch time, so those two figures should be treated as directionally indicative rather than fully confirmed. Toggl, after merging its standalone Toggl Plan scheduling product into a single unified "Toggl" product, now prices Starter at $9/user/month (annual billing, $12 if billed monthly) and Premium at $16/user/month (annual, $24 monthly), with Capacity Management pulled out as a separate paid add-on at $5-6/user/month and Time Off Management as another $2/user/month add-on, which means the feature this report's target buyer actually wants (capacity visibility) is no longer part of Toggl's core offer, it is a stack of three separate line items. Reddit users independently corroborate this landscape: one r/projectmanagement commenter directly compares Resource Guru and Float, noting Resource Guru is "less expensive than" Float, confirming the price-sensitivity of buyers shopping in this exact category, while another thread recommends Float specifically for small teams needing a "simple, visual resource planner" as the small-team option within an otherwise heavier PSA category, versus Smartsheet for larger teams needing automation. A separate thread describes a digital agency stitching together Trello, Teamweek/Toggl Plan, and a Float trial because no single tool covered both tasks and capacity, specifically noting Toggl Plan "does not have any reports at all," evidence of exactly the fragmented, multi-tool stack a unified lightweight planner should replace.

🌊 Blue Ocean Strategy

The blue ocean here is not a new feature, it is a new pricing and scope philosophy applied to a category everyone else has over-built. Float, Runn, and Kantata compete on depth: more integrations, more reporting, more permission layers, more seat types, because their buyers are 50-500 person firms where a dedicated resource manager justifies that complexity and the per-seat math works in the vendor's favor as headcount grows. A boutique-focused tool should deliberately compete on narrowness instead: one view (who's over and under capacity this week, across every active project), one pricing model (a flat monthly fee banded by team size, not a per-seat multiplier that punishes growth), and a setup time measured in minutes, not days. This directly answers the two recurring complaints found across the evidence: that dedicated tools are "heavy and expensive for small teams" and that generic PM tools require "building your own system with custom fields." The wedge is to be positioned explicitly as the tool between a spreadsheet and Float, not as a cheaper Float, which matters because Resource Guru already occupies the "cheaper Float" lane at $4.16/person and still uses per-person pricing that scales with headcount, the same structural complaint buyers have about the whole category. A flat banded price (for example, one price for up to 5 people, a higher flat price for up to 15 people, with no further per-seat math inside each band) is the actual differentiator, not a lower per-seat number. The secondary blue ocean angle is explicitly building an "I outgrew you, here's your export" off-ramp into the product from day one: the r/projectmanagement thread about a team that outgrew Float shows that even satisfied small-tool customers eventually graduate, and a lightweight planner that makes that graduation painless (clean CSV/API export, no lock-in) will earn more trust and referrals from buyers who know, going in, that the tool has an honest ceiling rather than pretending to scale infinitely.