What a seat minimum and an escalator do over three years

An annual price escalator raises the per-seat rate each renewal by an agreed percentage. It is a standard clause and it is disclosed, but it means the figure in year one is not the figure across the term. Over three years, a small escalator on a larger per-seat price compounds into a meaningfully different total from a flat price on a smaller one.

The right way to compare is to build both curves for your headcount over the term you expect to run, including the seat floor, and to include any add-on modules each vendor charges for. That exercise usually matters more than any single feature either product has.

Surhires does not apply an annual escalator. The prices are provisional pending buyer validation, which is a different kind of uncertainty and one we would rather state than hide: they may change before they are locked, and the pricing page says so today.

Crelate's strength is configurability. US staffing firms with an unusual pipeline shape can build it, and firms that have already invested in that configuration get value that a comparison table cannot see. Flexibility is a real product quality.

Surhires starts from a configured position instead. Six vertical templates, contingent permanent placement, retained executive search, contract and temp staffing, RPO delivery, in-house corporate talent and solo headhunter, are applied at signup so stages, fields, dispositions and dashboards arrive ready to work. Role homes for the solo recruiter, agency owner, in-house talent lead, RPO delivery lead, sourcer and coordinator do the same for the landing screen.

You can still change all of it. The difference is whether the first week is spent configuring or billing.

AI matching is included in Surhires's Professional plan at $49 per user per month with one hundred credits per user per month, and the Match Scorer shows which requirement drove each point rather than returning a bare figure. AutoShortlist turns a new requisition into a working shortlist from records you already hold, and the Resume Screener normalises skills, seniority and location at capture time.

Ten of the twelve named agents are live. The AI Notetaker and the AI Sourcing Agent are planned. Talent pools, the client portal, structured data import, consent and retention tooling, interview kits and source-of-hire attribution are in build for Wave 1. Placement invoicing, analytics, scorecards, duplicate detection and multi-board posting are shipping and being extended.

Those labels are the same everywhere on this site. A comparison page is exactly where a vendor is most tempted to upgrade them, which is why they are repeated here.

Surhires is not an HRIS, a payroll system, a background-check provider or an assessment platform. Background screening, testing and e-signature run through integrations. There is no pay-and-bill module and none is planned for Wave 1, so timesheets, contractor payroll and margin reconciliation belong elsewhere.

Placement invoicing raises the first invoice against a placement and tracks it; it is not a billing engine for a large contractor book. If your temp desk runs weekly timesheets across hundreds of contractors, that is a back-office requirement and you should buy for it directly.

SOC 2 is a readiness programme in progress with a Type I report as the first deliverable. No Type II report is claimed until one has been issued, and the trust page carries the current state rather than a badge.

If you are a US staffing firm that wants a highly configurable pipeline and you have the operations capacity to build and maintain it, Crelate is a strong answer. Firms with an unusual submittal or approval flow, or with reporting that has to match an existing structure exactly, often get further with a configurable product than with a templated one.

It is also the better choice if you already run five or more seats, are comfortable with the escalator as a term, and have the product configured to the way your desks work. Reconfiguring in a new system is real work, and the licence saving takes time to repay it.

Surhires is the better fit for a smaller desk where a three-seat minimum matters, for a team that wants a configured starting point rather than a build, and for firms who want AI matching and WhatsApp communication inside the core plan.