What do your team's tools cost per year?
Per-seat prices look small monthly and stop looking small once you multiply by twelve and by everyone.
Per year, both tools
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Per month, both tools
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Ceyu Pro for the same team, per year
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Difference per year
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Formula: people × (whiteboard + project tool) × 12
What the number assumes
The defaults are Miro Starter at $8 and Asana Starter at $10.99 per user per month billed yearly, checked on 29 July 2026 against their pricing pages. Ceyu Pro is $12.50 per user per month billed yearly. Change the inputs to match what you actually pay.
The formula defines the arithmetic. It does not define your business. A figure from this page is a starting point for a decision rather than the decision.
What a per-seat subscription actually costs
A per-seat price is a small number that gets multiplied twice: once by everyone who has a licence, and once by twelve. Eight people on a $9 tool is $864 a year, not $9, and a team that runs a whiteboard and a planning tool side by side is paying both.
This is why software budgets drift without anyone deciding to spend more. Each individual subscription is below the threshold at which anyone reviews it, and the total is not visible in any one place.
The seats nobody is using
Provisioned seats outlive the people who needed them. Someone leaves and the licence is not released; a project ends and the contractors keep access; a team trials a tool for six people and rolls it out to sixty. Every one of those is billed in full, every month, until someone looks.
The check is quick: export the seat list from each tool and compare it to the current staff list. Do it once a quarter. In most organisations the first run pays for itself several times over, and the second run is much shorter.
When consolidating tools actually saves money
Consolidation is worth it when the two tools genuinely overlap in what your team does with them, and not worth it when one of them is doing something the replacement cannot. The saving is real; so is the cost of a migration and the productivity dip while people relearn where things are.
Work out the switching cost honestly, counting export time, rebuild time and the weeks at reduced speed, then compare it to the annual difference. If the payback is longer than a year, the case is about capability rather than price, and it should be argued that way.
How to compare prices without being misled
Compare on the same basis: the same billing period, the same tier, the same number of seats, on the same date. Vendors change prices, and a comparison that was true last year is not evidence about this one.
Watch for the tier the features you need actually sit in. A tool advertised at a low per-seat price frequently keeps permissions, single sign-on or export behind a higher tier, and the price you will actually pay is the one that includes what you cannot do without.
Reviewing software spend without a spreadsheet war
Ask three questions of every subscription at renewal, and only three: who is on it, what would break if it went away, and what it costs per person actually using it. Anything that cannot answer the second question is a candidate, and anything whose third answer is far above its list price has idle seats.
Do it on a fixed date rather than when a renewal notice arrives, because a notice arrives with a deadline attached and a deadline is not a good condition for a decision. A quarterly half-hour with the invoice list in front of you is enough for most organisations.
Expect the total to be higher than anyone's mental model of it. Software spend accumulates through small, individually defensible decisions, which is exactly the pattern that produces a number nobody predicted.
Questions
Is this a fair comparison?
Only if you genuinely need both a whiteboard and a project tool. If you need one, compare that one directly, because the gap is much smaller and the other product may well win.
What about the free plans?
Free plans cap what you can do rather than what you pay. Miro's free plan allows 3 editable boards and Ceyu's allows 3 boards and 3 projects. Neither is a plan a working team stays on.
Should I count everyone or only active users?
Count what you pay for, which is usually more than what you use. Most per-seat tools bill on provisioned seats, so a leaver whose licence was never released is still on the invoice. That gap is the easiest saving in most software budgets and the one nobody is responsible for finding.
Are annual plans always cheaper?
Per seat, usually, and commonly 15 to 20 per cent. Across the year, only if the headcount holds. An annual plan bought for a team that shrinks in month three costs more than the monthly plan it replaced, and most annual terms cannot be reduced mid-term.
What is not in this comparison?
It is the cost of running two tools rather than one. A second set of accounts to provision and remove, a second permissions model to get right, a second export to do when someone asks for their data, and the time spent moving information between the two. None of it is on an invoice, and it is frequently larger than the difference in price.
Related calculators
Same corner of the arithmetic, different question.