Forty dollars a month, for everyone on the issue

It is $40 — not a starting point, not a number with a footnote hanging off it. That is the price for your whole team, and there is no second number anywhere on this page for it to be compared against. Two of you or twenty, the plan is the plan.

It renews monthly. There is no annual version, no discount for committing, no offer that expires on Friday. Those are instruments for a product with a sales team, and you already know from the home page what this is instead.

The week the home page describes — the printer, the ad director and the editor each working from a different export, and nobody knows it yet — has exactly one fix: everyone reading the same plan. That is not a feature of the tool so much as the point of it.

Per-seat pricing taxes that fix. It puts a small arithmetic problem between you and adding the ad director, at the exact moment the ad director is the person you most need looking at the plan. A tool whose value is everyone in one place should not charge you per person for putting everyone in one place.

Add everyone who touches the issue. It costs the same.

The editor, the ad director, the designer, the person at the printer you actually talk to. The plan gets more useful with each of them on it, and the price does not know they arrived.

The boundaries come included too. Everything in "Things it does not do" — no live co-editing, no writing back to your spreadsheet, no production tracking, no change history, .xlsx in and 600 pages at most — holds at every price, because there is only one price. Nobody will ever phone you to explain that the thing you are missing lives in a tier above.

Even at $40 a month, somebody signs off — and on a small book that somebody is probably you. When the question comes, do not answer it in return on investment. That is the other tools' argument, built for the person who signs cheques, and it is not the currency you actually spend.

Your currency is hours. The Friday evening that went on renumbering forty rows because a feature grew by two. The week of three different exports. The reprint — there is only ever one of those you remember. That is what a plan costs when it is wrong, and none of it ever arrives as an invoice. Weigh the forty against those, because those are what you are already paying.

There is no signup page behind the button below, because there is no signup. Nothing in the product knows what a subscription is — no plan table, no card form, no trial counting down in the corner. The commerce is unbuilt. The tool is not: it plans, renumbers and exports a magazine that actually goes to print, and has for a while.

So the mechanic, honestly stated, is me. You write and tell me about your issue — how many pages, how many ads, what your spreadsheet looks like — and I set your team up: everyone who touches the issue, on the one plan, at the one price. That is what I will ask, so you may as well lead with it.

Goes to Brian, who produces IAM 360 and sets every team up himself. The email is the signup.