If you've ever deployed an internal tool to your organization using Retool, you've encountered the "Viewer Tax" — the moment when your brilliant automation suddenly becomes a budget line item multiplied by headcount.

A dashboard that helps 500 customer support agents? That's not a $99/month tool. That's a $49,500/year commitment. An ops tool your entire warehouse team needs? Better start counting heads.

We built Build0 with a different philosophy.

Not because we've found a way to make infrastructure free — we haven't — but because we believe per-seat pricing creates the wrong incentives for internal tools.

The Problem with Per-Seat Pricing

Per-seat pricing makes sense for some software. Figma charges per designer because each designer gets dedicated value. Slack charges per user because each user consumes messaging infrastructure.

But internal tools are different. When you build a dashboard for your support team, the value isn't in how many people can view it — it's in the decisions it enables, the time it saves, the errors it prevents.

Per-seat pricing for internal tools creates perverse incentives:

• Limit distribution to control costs - that warehouse dashboard? Maybe only supervisors get access

• Build fewer tools - every new tool multiplies your seat count problem

• Avoid self-service - better to have one person run reports than give everyone access

You end up optimizing for fewer users instead of more impact.

How Build0 Actually Works

Let's be clear about what happens when you publish a Build0 app:

1. Your app deploys to our infrastructure - we host it on our Vercel account.

2. End-users authenticate through our system - we handle identity for published apps.

3. Database and integration traffic flows through us - credentials are secured and proxied via our API.

4. We serve every request- when your 500 support agents load that dashboard, our servers respond

We're not passing infrastructure costs to a third party. We're absorbing them.

So why don't we charge per viewer?

Because we think there's a better way to align our business with your success.

Our Pricing Philosophy

We charge for building, not for using.

Credits are consumed when you're actively developing with our AI assistant — generating code, iterating on features, adding integrations. Once your app is published and your team is using it, the development credits stop flowing.

The logic:

Your support dashboard took 10,000 credits to build → 500 agents use it daily → You pay for the 10,000 credits, not for the 500 agents

This means your cost is tied to development velocity, not organizational headcount.

What About Infrastructure Costs?

Fair question. If we're serving requests for your 500 support agents, we're incurring real costs. How does that work?

Today: We absorb these costs as part of your subscription. The difference between a Team plan customer with 10 users and one with 500 users is margin, not revenue. We're betting that the value we provide in development speed justifies flat-rate pricing.

Tomorrow: As we scale, we may introduce usage-based components for high-traffic applications:

• Execution time for compute-intensive operations

• Request volume for high-QPS applications

• Storage and bandwidth for data-heavy apps

But here's the key difference: usage-based pricing is not seat-based pricing.

If your app serves 500 users making 10 requests each, you'd pay for 5,000 requests - not 500 seats. If those same 500 users make 2 requests each, you'd pay for 1,000 requests. Your cost scales with actual infrastructure consumption, not with how many names are in your org chart.

The Incentive Alignment

Let's compare the incentives:

In no scenario do we profit simply from you having a large organization. We profit when you're building, or when what you've built is actively delivering value.

When Does This Matter Most?

Internal Tools with Wide Distribution

The classic viewer tax scenario: tools that many people need to access but few need to modify.

• Operations dashboards

• Customer support tools

• Inventory management

• Reporting interfaces

• Approval workflows

These are exactly the tools where per-seat pricing hurts most. You're not giving 500 people Photoshop-level creative capabilities — you're giving them a window into data they need to do their jobs.

Public-Facing Applications

Build0 supports public access for published apps. Enable it, and anyone with the link can use your app without authentication.

Customer portals, partner dashboards, public data tools — all without counting external users as "seats."

Rapid Prototyping and Experimentation

When every new tool multiplies your seat licensing, experimentation gets expensive. With Build0, you can spin up ten prototypes, let your team try them, and only pay for the development time — not for the organizational curiosity.

What We're Not Saying

Let's be honest about the trade-offs:

We're not saying infrastructure is free. We incur real costs when your apps serve traffic. We've chosen to absorb those costs today and may price them explicitly tomorrow.

We're not saying Retool is wrong to charge per seat. They've built a large business on that model. Per-seat pricing is predictable for both vendor and customer, and it's the norm in enterprise SaaS.

We're not saying we'll never raise prices. If our costs scale faster than our revenue, we'll need to adjust. But we're committed to never making "add a user" the primary cost driver.

The Bottom Line

The viewer tax isn't inevitable. It's a choice.

Retool chose per-seat pricing because it's a proven enterprise model and because their architecture (centralized platform, managed connectors, compliance certifications) genuinely incurs per-user costs.

We chose development-based pricing because we believe internal tools should spread freely through organizations, and because we'd rather align our revenue with your building than with your headcount.

Both models can work. But if you've ever looked at a per-seat calculator and wondered whether you could really justify giving that dashboard to the whole team - we built Build0 for you.