A Five-Person Software Stack Under $100 a Month
The standard five-person stack runs $216.25/month. This page asks a narrower question: can a real five-person business operate under $100/month without pretending?
Yes — $74.99/month, $15 per person. But it costs you four specific things, and you should decide about each one deliberately rather than discovering them later.
The stack — $74.99/month ($899.88/year, $15.00 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 | IDrive Team (5 users, 5 TB pooled) | flat | $9.99 |
| Accounting | Wave Starter | free | $0.00 |
| E-signature | SignWell Light (1 sender) | flat | $10.00 |
| CRM | deferred — see below | — | $0.00 |
| Total | $74.99 |
Notice what did not get cut: email on your own domain, a team password manager, and real backup. Those three are the floor. Cut any of them and you’re not running a lean business, you’re running an exposed one.
The four things you give up
1. No CRM (the big one — $70/month of the difference)
This is where most of the saving comes from, and it’s the compromise that actually hurts. Five people managing clients in a shared spreadsheet works until it doesn’t — usually the day two people email the same prospect, or someone leaves and takes the context with them.
When to stop deferring: you have more than ~30 active opportunities, more than one person selling, or you’ve already had a “wait, who’s talking to them?” moment. Then budget $70/month for Pipedrive Lite and accept the stack is now $145.
The honest middle: Capsule’s free tier (2 users, 250 contacts) covers a five-person shop where only two people actually touch the pipeline. That’s a legitimate answer, not a cop-out.
2. Pooled backup instead of unlimited-per-machine
IDrive Team gives five users 5 TB of shared storage for $9.99/month. Backblaze gives each computer unlimited backup for $8.25/month — $41.25 for five. The $31/month saving is real, and so is the trade-off: if your team works with video, large design files, or big datasets, 5 TB pooled disappears fast, and you’ll be managing quota instead of forgetting about it.
Test before committing: add up what’s actually on your five machines today. Under ~3 TB, take the saving. Over it, don’t.
3. Free accounting means fewer features, not fewer obligations
Wave’s free tier does unlimited invoicing and bookkeeping genuinely well — you pay only card-processing fees. What you don’t get: bank feeds on the free plan, 1099 e-filing, and the recurring-invoice sophistication a retainer business eventually needs. Zoho Books Standard at $15/month (3 users included) is the upgrade, and it’s cheap enough that you should take it the moment bookkeeping costs you an hour a month.
4. One e-signature sender
SignWell Light at $10/month means one person sends contracts. For a five-person firm where the founder signs everything, that’s fine. The moment two people need to send independently, it’s $30/month for the Business plan with three senders.
The stack this becomes
Add back what you deferred, in the order most teams actually need it:
| Add | When | Running total |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline | — | $74.99 |
| + Zoho Books Standard (replaces Wave) | bookkeeping costs you an hour/month | $89.99 |
| + SignWell Business (3 senders) | second person needs to send contracts | $109.99 |
| + Pipedrive Lite × 5 | pipeline outgrows a spreadsheet | $179.99 |
| + Backblaze (replaces IDrive) | you outgrow 5 TB pooled | $211.25 |
The full-fat stack is $216.25. So the honest summary is: you can run five people for $75/month, and the path from there to the “proper” stack is four decisions, not one big purchase.
What you should never cut to hit a number
- MFA on email. Free. Non-negotiable. It’s the single highest-value security control available to you and it costs nothing.
- The team password manager. $20/month is the cost of being able to revoke one person’s access in a click. Sharing passwords in chat to save it is a false economy that shows up at the worst possible moment.
- Backup with version history. Cloud sync is not backup (why) — it syncs deletions and ransomware faithfully.
- Your own domain on email. $7/user is the cheapest credibility you will ever buy.
Check it against your own bill
Run your real subscriptions through the cost calculator — it flags duplicate categories and shows the same stack at 5, 10, and 25 people. Most teams over $100/month at this size are paying for overlap, not capability.
All prices verified 2026-07-30 from vendors’ official pricing pages, US pricing, annual-billing rates where offered. Vendors change prices without notice. Full sourcing and method: what a small team actually pays for software.