Leader Ethos has two pricing models on one page, and they contradict each other on purpose.
Individuals and teams pay a subscription: quarterly assessments, trend lines, a dashboard, and for a leader with direct reports, the same view across the whole team. Hiring teams pay nothing up front. They buy credits, send a candidate a single-use link, and get charged when the candidate finishes. If the candidate never finishes, no charge.
Same assessment. Two different jobs. Two different prices.
Why not seats
Subscriptions work when usage is steady. A leader developing over a year takes an assessment each quarter and watches the trend. A leader with a team does the same for their direct reports, quarter after quarter, watching who's growing and where. Either way the rhythm is regular, and a monthly fee is reasonable against it.
Hiring isn't steady. A company fills two roles in March, none until September, then five in October. Seat pricing charges them for the quiet months and then caps them in the busy ones. Every HR team I talked to had a story about a tool they paid for eleven months to use during one. Seats punish the exact shape of the work.
Why not per invite
The obvious alternative is charging per candidate invited. Simpler to build. Simpler to explain. And wrong, because a meaningful share of candidates never open the link. They took another offer. They ghosted. The recruiter sent it to the wrong email.
Per-invite pricing means I get paid for every one of those. The product delivered nothing, and the invoice went out anyway. Worse, it means my revenue goes up when candidates drop out, which is precisely the outcome the hiring team doesn't want. A pricing model that profits from your customer's failure is a dark pattern with a spreadsheet.
How per-completion works
A hiring workspace buys credits in bulk. When a recruiter invites a candidate, one credit is reserved: held, not charged. When the candidate completes the assessment, the credit is consumed and the profile appears in the dashboard next to the other candidates. If the link expires unused, the credit goes back.
Reserving instead of charging matters. Without it, a team with five credits could invite fifty candidates and hope. With it, credits map to real capacity, and the team always knows how many more people they can assess.
The cost of this model is complexity. Three states per credit instead of one. A profile that can be started but not finished. Expiry logic. A dashboard that has to show "invited," "started," and "completed" as different things. It was about five more days of work than a per-invite model would have been, and every one of those days bought a pricing page I can defend without a footnote.
Why the two models coexist
The subscription is for someone using the assessment on themselves or their team, repeatedly, over time, with people who aren't going anywhere. The credit is for someone using it on strangers, in bursts, with no idea when the next burst comes or whether the candidate will still be in the process next week. Forcing both into one plan would mean one of them paying for the other's shape.
The general rule: price on the unit the customer already thinks in. A leader thinks in quarters and in the people on their team. A recruiter thinks in candidates. Charge for those.
If you're hiring me
Pricing is a product decision, and it usually shows up in the data model. "Charge per completion" is one sentence on a pricing page and three states in a database. If you bring me a product, expect the pricing conversation to happen before the schema is designed, because the schema is where the pricing model actually lives.
Find the unit your customer already counts in. Charge for that, and only when it happened.