Why we charge per client

Picture a media buyer on a Thursday afternoon. Their link tool charges by the link. They have used thirty-nine of the forty their plan allows this month, and they need six more before the campaign goes live tomorrow. What happens next is not a pricing question. It is a data question.

They could ask someone to upgrade the plan, which means finding the person who holds the card, explaining why, and waiting. Or they could open the old spreadsheet, build the six links by hand and ship them. The campaign goes out on time. Nobody is annoyed. Six links now exist that the registry has never heard of.

That is the whole argument for how Tag Docket is priced.

A registry that is missing links is not a registry

Tag Docket is a system of record. Its value is that every tagged URL and QR code an agency makes for a client is in one place, with who made it, when, what it pointed at and what it was tagged as. You can find what a colleague shipped last Tuesday. You can tell which of forty codes is on the postcard about to be reprinted. You can check whether the gutters campaign was ever tagged at all.

Each of those questions only has an answer if the record is complete. Six links in a spreadsheet are six places where the registry says “we have no record of that”, and it says it with the same confidence it uses for everything else. A record that is mostly complete is worse than it sounds, because nobody can tell which part is missing.

Charging per link puts a price on exactly the behaviour the product depends on. The buyer near the cap is not being difficult. They are responding sensibly to the incentive in front of them, and the incentive says to keep the marginal link out.

The same reason, for seats

Per-seat pricing has the same problem one step earlier.

The people whose links most need to be in the registry are often the ones an owner would least want to pay a seat for: the freelancer brought in for one quarter, the junior buyer, the account manager who makes three links a month. Put a price on each login and those are the people who end up sharing someone else’s, or sending their links to a colleague to enter, or skipping it.

So seats in Tag Docket are uncapped, on every plan. Add whoever makes links. Sign-in is by emailed link with no password, so a person joining or leaving is not a password being reset or shared in a chat. Someone who leaves keeps their name on the links they made, because they still made them.

Why clients are the honest measure

If the meter is not links and not people, it has to be something that grows with the value an agency gets and the work we do. Clients are that.

Agencies already think in clients. They budget per client and they bill their own customers per client. On our side, the things that cost money, such as reading GA4, checking links against it and keeping the platform packs current, scale with the number of clients rather than the number of links. A client with four hundred links a month and a client with four are about the same amount of work for us, and it would be odd to charge one a hundred times the other.

So the plans are tiers by client count, from three clients up to sixty, with a quoted plan beyond that. The price of adding a link is nothing. The price of adding a colleague is nothing.

The one place a limit applies

Creating a new client is the only action a plan limit ever blocks, and when it does it says so with the numbers — how many clients you have and how many the plan allows — rather than a bare error.

Nothing else stops. Minting never stops, bulk paste never stops, and the history never becomes read-only because a count was reached.

Three other decisions follow from the same reasoning.

Accepting a transferred client never blocks. When a client moves to your agency from another one, the transfer completes even if it takes you past your plan. You are flagged as over the limit and prompted to upgrade afterwards. Refusing at that moment would leave a client’s link history half-moved, and it would be a terrible first impression for everyone involved.

A failed payment is not a lockout. Cards expire and get replaced. A declined payment starts a 14-day grace period, not a lost afternoon of an agency being unable to reach its own campaign history.

Cancelling deletes nothing. An agency that stops paying still owns its history. The plan steps down, every client stays where it is, and the record is still there. Retiring a client works the same way: archived, never deleted, and its short codes keep resolving, because a yard sign in the ground does not know its client was tidied up.

What this costs us

Pricing this way leaves money on the table from the heaviest users, and we know it. An agency making thousands of links a month for a handful of clients pays the same as one making a few hundred.

We are fine with that, because the alternative is a product whose own pricing teaches people to keep things out of it. The competitor for Tag Docket is a spreadsheet, and every agency we talk to arrives holding one. A plan that sends the forty-first link back to that spreadsheet has lost to it.

If that sounds like the right trade for your agency, the pricing page has the tiers and the figures. We are setting agencies up directly rather than through a signup form, so if you would like to talk it through, request access and we will be in touch.