What a Surhires seat costs a UK agency

Starter is for a small desk coming off spreadsheets and a shared inbox. It carries the candidate pipeline, the vacancy board, posting to LinkedIn and Indeed, one job board connector, manual CV upload, search and tagging, WhatsApp basics and the recruiter mobile app, with a cap of five hundred candidates and a maximum of ten seats.

Professional is the working plan for a billing desk. It adds AI candidate-to-job matching with a monthly credit allowance per user, CV parsing and bulk import, AutoShortlist, duplicate detection, the candidate blacklist, interview scheduling across rounds, full WhatsApp Business API, the deeper LinkedIn Recruiter integration, placement invoicing and the reporting pack. Most UK agencies with a mixed perm and contract desk will need this tier rather than Starter.

Enterprise is for multi-entity staffing groups that need a security review, SSO and SAML, multi-brand configuration, custom SLAs, advanced analytics and database export, and migration assistance off an incumbent system. It carries a platform fee alongside the per-seat price and a five-seat minimum.

Every figure on this page is exclusive of VAT. The supplier is Soor LLC, a Delaware company, so the VAT treatment of your purchase depends on your own registration status rather than on a simple UK-supplier rule. We capture your VAT registration number at the point of sale and the treatment applied appears on the invoice.

If your finance team needs that position confirmed in writing before a purchase order is raised, ask during the sales conversation rather than after the first invoice. We would much rather answer it up front than have it become a dispute in month two. What we will not do is publish a blanket statement about your VAT position, because the correct answer depends on facts about your business that we do not have.

Starter and Professional both carry a three-seat minimum. Enterprise starts at five. A solo recruiter can absolutely run a desk on this software, but the minimum means the smallest bill is three seats regardless.

The reason is straightforward: the cost of supporting an account is not proportional to its seat count. Imports, onboarding and messaging infrastructure cost roughly the same for one seat as for three. Setting the floor at three rather than five is a deliberate difference from several competitors, and it is the reason a two-person agency can still buy here without being pushed into an enterprise conversation.

The trial runs for fourteen days and does not ask for a credit card. You get the Professional feature set during it, which means you can test AI matching and CV parsing on your own data rather than on a sanitised demo database.

There is no free-forever tier and there is not going to be one. Recruitment software needs a database import, an onboarding conversation and messaging infrastructure before it does anything useful, and an unsupported free account gives you a half-configured system and a bad impression of the product. Fourteen supported days is more useful than an indefinite unsupported one.

Onboarding on the higher tiers carries a one-time fee, and that fee is scoped at the point of sale rather than published as a number here. The reason is that the work varies enormously. Importing a clean CSV of eight thousand candidates is a different job from lifting fifteen years of custom fields, attachment history and note threads out of an incumbent system.

We would rather quote the actual job than publish a headline figure that turns out to be wrong in either direction. Ask for the scope in writing before you sign; a migration quote that will not put its assumptions on paper is not a quote.

Enterprise also carries a platform fee on top of seats, quoted in USD at two thousand dollars a month, which covers the security review, the SLA and the named customer success contact.

Messaging costs are passed through. WhatsApp Business API conversations, SMS and voice minutes are billed by the underlying provider, and where a connector requires your own account with a third party, that account is yours. AI matching credits are allocated per user per month on Professional; heavier use is an add-on rather than an unlimited promise.

Background checks, assessments, payroll and pay and bill are not included because Surhires does not do them. It is recruitment software: candidate relationships, sourcing, submittals and the placement pipeline through to the first invoice. Anything past the invoice runs in the system you already have.

Seats can be added mid-term and are charged pro rata from the date they are added. Removing seats takes effect at the renewal rather than immediately, so a desk that shrinks in March is billed for its March seats until the term ends. That is the ordinary arrangement in this category and we state it rather than leaving it in the terms.

Data export is a product feature, not a retention lever. You can export candidates, clients, vacancies, placements and activity as CSV or JSON at any point during the subscription, including the day you decide to leave. Advanced export and database extract sit on Enterprise, but a full record export is available on every plan.