Breezy HR (affiliate link) publishes its prices, which puts it ahead of most of this market. You can read the tiers without talking to anyone, and the free plan is a real free plan rather than a fourteen-day clock.

This is what those numbers looked like from inside an account. I opened one on 11 August 2026, ran it through a trial, dropped it to the free tier on 22 August, and have been watching the same account since. I have never paid Breezy anything. My billing history is one line — 22 August 2026, $0.00, Paid. So take what follows as a careful reading of the screens, not as an invoice.

The short version

• The big number is the annual number. $157 /month for Startup is what you pay if you commit to a year. Billed monthly, Startup is $189.
• That $189 never appears on the plan page. It appears inside the upgrade prompts you hit when you touch a locked feature.
• The annual discount is slightly better than advertised. The toggle says Billed Annually 15% OFF. On Startup the saving works out at 16.9%.
• Paid plans are not priced per seat. The page says all of them include unlimited users and unlimited candidates, which changes who Breezy is cheap for.
• The free plan lists five features. One of them did not work for me, and another has a thirty-day fuse attached.
• The AI is metered separately. Credits are $30 per 100,000 and do not expire.
• Downgrading is free and silent. The confirmation says Total $0 and warns you about nothing.

What the plan page shows

This is the comparison table as it stood on 22 August, 6 September and 9 September 2026. The prices were identical on all three visits, and between 6 and 9 September the wording did not change down to the punctuation:

Above the table sits the sentence that matters more than the prices do:

All paid plans include unlimited users, candidates, and support—built to scale from 10 to 10K.

And above the free column, in smaller text:

Bootstrap tier includes full access to candidates from the past 30 days.

The number the plan page never prints

The prices above are annual prices, shown as a monthly figure. The toggle at the top of the table reads Billed Annually 15% OFF and Billed Monthly, and it defaults to annual.

What the page does not print anywhere, in either state of that toggle, is the monthly figure itself. The saving line lets you work it out. Startup at $157 /month billed annually is $1,884 for the year. Add the Save $384/year back and you get $2,268, which is $189 a month:

I did not have to trust the arithmetic. Those monthly figures appear inside the product. On the free plan, opening Task Management produces an upgrade prompt that quotes Startup at $189/month, and the prompt behind custom pipelines and questionnaires quotes the same figure. Growth appears as $329 in the same kind of prompt.

So the same plan carries two numbers in one session: $157 on the page where you choose a plan, $189 on the screen where you hit a wall. Both are true, they are just different billing bases — but only one of them is printed where you are comparing vendors.

One small thing in your favour while you are there. The toggle advertises 15% off, and $384 out of $2,268 is 16.9%. The discount is better than the label.

What the free plan includes, and what it does

The Bootstrap column lists five active features:

1. 1 active position or pool
2. World-class resume parsing
3. Branded Career Site
4. Distribute to 50+ Job Boards
5. Privacy, security & GDPR compliance

Everything from Multi-factor Authentication down is greyed out.

Two of those five need a footnote that the page does not give them.

Job board distribution was listed and did not run. The free advertising option on my account was greyed out and pointed at support, with no mention anywhere on the pricing page of the verification step it was waiting on. I wrote that up separately in Breezy HR’s free job ads need an approval it never mentions.

“Full access to candidates from the past 30 days” is a countdown, not a quota. Candidates older than thirty days are not deleted and not hidden — their names and email addresses are replaced by random strings, regenerated on every page load. By 23 September, every one of my eighteen candidates had gone that way. The measurements are in Breezy HR’s 30-day limit does not delete. It scrambles names.

That is the part I would weigh hardest. A free plan that holds one open role is a fair deal. A free plan that turns last month’s applicants into character salad is a different product, and the pricing page describes it in eleven words.

What the free plan cannot open

On Bootstrap, ten items in the settings sidebar carry a lock icon:

Approvals, Custom Fields, Data Manager, Hello Messenger, Interview Guides, Pipelines, Questionnaires, Scheduling Links, Scorecards and eDocuments.

General, People, Security, Career Site and Subscriptions & Billing open normally.

The lock icon is worth noticing, because Breezy uses it consistently for “your plan does not include this”. When something stops working for a reason that is not your plan — the advertising block above — there is no lock and no explanation. If you are evaluating the free tier, a locked screen is a price question and an unlocked-but-dead screen is something else.

The AI is a separate meter

Breezy Intelligence — résumé parsing, candidate scoring, the summaries — runs on credits, and credits are not part of the subscription price. The purchase screen prices them at $30 for 100,000 credits, sold in increments of 100,000 up to a maximum of 1,000,000 per account, and states that they never expire.

Two things I checked rather than assumed. Auto-recharge was off by default on my account, so the meter cannot quietly bill you. And the counter only moves when a résumé goes through it: my usage sat at 5057 / 100000 on 22 August and was still 5057 / 100000 on 6 September, with the account open the whole time. Credits burn on work, not on time.

I have not bought any, so I cannot tell you what 100,000 credits buys in candidates. What I can tell you is that the AI keeps running on the free plan — I downgraded and it kept scoring — which means the meter is live on a plan that cannot top it up without a card on file.

Going back down is free, and silent

Downgrading took one screen. Modify Subscription, pick Hire Bootstrap, and the confirmation reads Total $0.

No proration to argue about, no retention offer, no phone call. I rate that highly, and it is the opposite of what happened when Manatal’s trial ended and the product became a checkout.

What the screen does not say is what you are about to lose: not the thirty-day clause, not the locked settings, not the scorecards. The exit is clean and uninformative in the same breath.

Is $157 cheap? That depends on your headcount

Because paid plans are not priced per seat, the comparison that matters is not how much hiring you do — it is how many people need to log in.

Manatal (affiliate link), the other product I have run the same test data through, starts at $15 per seat per month billed annually and has no free plan. Both numbers are entry-tier and the feature sets are not equivalent, so treat this as arithmetic rather than a recommendation:

The crossover sits at eleven seats on annual billing. Under that, per-seat pricing wins on price alone; over it, Breezy’s flat fee does. A three-person company paying $157 a month for Breezy is buying something other than seats, and should be able to name what it is.

What I would check before paying

1. Decide your billing basis first. If monthly matters to you, the price is $189, not $157, and the plan page will not tell you that.
2. Count logins, not hires. Unlimited users is the strongest thing on Breezy’s pricing page, and it is wasted on a team of three.
3. Try the free tier for more than thirty days before you trust it. The first month looks complete. The thirty-first does not.
4. Ask what the AI costs at your volume. The subscription and the meter are separate bills, and only one of them is on the pricing page.

All prices above are US dollars, as displayed to my account between 22 August and 9 September 2026. If you are reading this much later, check them again — and if Breezy has changed them, tell me and I will date the correction.

Disclosure: the Breezy HR link in this post pays me a commission if you sign up through it, and it is marked where it appears above. It costs you nothing extra, it did not change a word of what this post says, and I do not accept payment in exchange for favourable coverage. Every other link here is an ordinary one.