The Software Stack for a Five-Person Agency
Five people is the size where informal stops working. The shared login someone set up in year one is now known by five people and two ex-contractors. Nobody’s sure who owns the domain. And the software bill has quietly become one of your larger fixed costs.
This is the stack that fixes all three, costed at exactly five people.
The stack — $216.25/month ($2,595/year, $43.25 per person)
| Category | Product | Basis | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email + office | Google Workspace Business Starter | $7.00 × 5 | $35.00 |
| Passwords | Bitwarden Teams | $4.00 × 5 | $20.00 |
| Backup | Backblaze Business Backup | $8.25 × 5 computers | $41.25 |
| CRM | Pipedrive Lite | $14.00 × 5 | $70.00 |
| Accounting | Zoho Books Standard | $15 (3 users) + 2 × $2.50 | $20.00 |
| E-signature | SignWell Business | flat, 3 senders | $30.00 |
| Total | $216.25 |
Swap Google Workspace for Microsoft 365 Business Basic and the total is identical — both are $7/user/month. Choose on which office suite your team actually uses, not on price.
Where five-person agencies overspend
1. The CRM line is the biggest single cost — and the most oversold. At $70/month it’s a third of this stack. Pipedrive Lite is the honest floor for a team genuinely running a sales pipeline. But if your “pipeline” is fifteen retainer clients and a referral network, you may not need a CRM at all yet — and every CRM vendor on the internet will tell you otherwise, because they wrote the article you read before this one.
2. Backup priced per computer, not per person. $8.25 each sounds small until someone has a laptop and a desktop — that’s two licenses for one human. Count machines, not headcount. If your team is laptop-only and you’d accept pooled storage instead of unlimited-per-machine, IDrive Team is $9.99/month for five users and 5 TB — a $31/month saving on this line alone. The trade-off is real (pooled quota, different restore experience), but for many agencies it’s the right call.
3. Annual vs monthly billing. Every per-user price above is the annual rate. Pay monthly and Pipedrive alone goes from $14 to $24 per user — that’s $50/month more for the same product. If you’re confident you’ll keep a tool twelve months, annual billing is the largest discount available to you.
What’s deliberately not in this stack
- Project management software. Real omission, deliberate: at five people the PM tool is the most-argued and least-decisive purchase, and the affiliate programs in that category are poor enough that most “best PM tool” articles are pure vendor marketing. Pick one your team will actually open, or keep using the one you have.
- A VPN or firewall appliance. A cloud-first five-person agency generally needs neither. See the security stack for what to skip and why.
- Managed endpoint protection. Built-in Defender/XProtect plus enforced updates is a defensible baseline at this size — unless an insurer or client contract names a product, in which case see the cyber-insurance guide.
- Dedicated HR/onboarding software. At five people, a written checklist beats a subscription.
The three things to fix in your first week
Software is the easy half. These are what actually separate a five-person agency that survives an incident from one that doesn’t:
- Move every shared login into the password manager. That’s what the $20/month is really buying — not password storage, but the ability to remove one person’s access in a single click. How to make the move.
- Write the access inventory. One page per person: every system they can reach. It converts a departure from a month of surprises into a one-hour teardown — and answers the security questionnaire your next enterprise client will send.
- Test a restore. Not “check the backup is running” — actually restore a file and a folder, and write down the date. An untested backup is a hope.
Scaling from here
| Team size | This stack costs | Per person |
|---|---|---|
| 5 people | $216.25/mo | $43.25 |
| 10 people | $395.00/mo | $39.50 |
| 25 people | $931.25/mo | $37.25 |
Per-person cost barely improves as you grow — there’s no volume relief coming. The lever is which tools you carry, not how many seats you buy. Model your own growth with the cost calculator.
Tighter budget? The under-$100 stack for five people shows exactly what you give up to get there — and it’s less than you’d expect.
All prices verified 2026-07-30 from vendors’ official pricing pages, US, annual-billing rates. Confirm current pricing before purchase. Sourcing: what small teams actually pay for software.