Short answer: Bonusly pricing is per user per month, and as publicly listed on Bonusly's pricing page at the time of writing, the entry tier (Core) runs roughly $3 per user per month, with a higher tier that adds analytics and incentive features landing around $5 per user per month, and a custom/enterprise tier that's quoted rather than published. There's a free trial but no free plan. And here's the part the pricing page doesn't put in the headline: the software fee is only the smaller of two numbers. The points your people redeem for gift cards are funded separately, and for most teams that reward budget is the bigger line by a wide margin.
That's the number you came for. The rest is the math behind it: what each tier includes, annual vs monthly billing, how the allowance model turns into a bill, worked totals for 25, 50, and 200 people, and when Bonusly earns its price. Vendor pricing changes, sometimes quietly — confirm the current tiers on bonusly.com/pricing before you build a budget on any number here, including ours.
Bonusly Pricing Plans at a Glance
Bonusly is a micro-bonus economy. Everyone gets a monthly allowance of points, gives them away in small amounts with a short public message and a hashtag, and recipients redeem what they've collected for gift cards, charity donations, or custom company rewards. It runs in Slack and Microsoft Teams, has mature mobile apps, and carries top review scores (around 4.8/5 on G2 across well over a thousand reviews). Three properties of the pricing model matter before any dollar figure does.
- It's per seat, per month. Every workspace member is a billable seat, whether they gave twenty bonuses last month or zero.
- It's a trial, not a free tier. You can pilot for free, then it's a card. There is no "stay free at small scale" fallback.
- The software fee and the reward budget are two separate meters. Bonusly charges you to run the points economy; you separately fund the points themselves. This is the mechanic that surprises first-time buyers, so it gets its own section below.
What each tier includes
As publicly listed at the time of writing, the tiers stack by features rather than volume. Core, at roughly $3 per user per month, is the full peer-to-peer product: the monthly allowance, public feed, value hashtags, the rewards catalog, Slack and Teams apps, and standard reporting. The higher tier (Bonusly has called it Pro), around $5 per user per month, layers on deeper analytics, automated incentives and awards, and more admin control. The custom tier is the enterprise motion: quoted pricing, HRIS integrations, dedicated support. Feature names shuffle between page redesigns, so treat the labels as approximate and the shape as reliable.
Annual vs monthly billing
The headline per-user prices are the annual-billing numbers, with month-to-month listed at a premium; we won't print the surcharge because it's exactly the kind of figure that changes without a press release. The budget implication: flexibility to cancel after a quarter costs more per seat, and a yearly commitment bills for the seats you signed up with even if headcount dips. Contract minimums and seat floors aren't consistently published, so ask before you sign rather than assuming there aren't any.
The Allowance Model: Why the Reward Budget Dwarfs the Software Fee
Here is the mechanic that makes Bonusly's true cost a multiple of its sticker price. Every employee receives a monthly allowance of points to give away, and you set the amount. Points have a fixed cash value. When someone redeems, the gift card is paid out of a reward pool you fund. The $3 or $5 per seat is the toll for the road; the points are the cargo.
So a real Bonusly budget has two lines: the subscription (headcount times the per-user rate) and the funded allowance (headcount times whatever each person can give away each month). Fund $10 per employee per month and the reward line is already more than three times the Core-tier software line. Fund something closer to the "1% of payroll" starting point often cited for a funded program and the software fee stops being the decision at all: at a $65,000 average salary, 1% of payroll is $650 per person per year, about $54 a month, roughly eighteen times the Core seat price.
None of this is a knock on Bonusly; it's the same on every catalog-based platform, as our rewards platform roundup notes. The mistake is budgeting for the subscription and being surprised by the pool. Budget the program, not the software; our guide to building an employee recognition program budget walks through the calculation.
Bonusly Cost Worked Out for 25, 50, and 200 People
Straight multiplication of the publicly listed per-user rates, with $10 per employee per month as the illustrative reward funding level. No volume discounts or minimums are assumed, because those aren't published rates and we won't invent them. Swap in your own reward number; the arithmetic is the point.
| Team size | Software, Core (~$3/user) | Software, higher tier (~$5/user) | Reward budget ($10/person/mo) | Total per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 people | $75/mo · $900/yr | $125/mo · $1,500/yr | $250/mo · $3,000/yr | $3,900 – $4,500 |
| 50 people | $150/mo · $1,800/yr | $250/mo · $3,000/yr | $500/mo · $6,000/yr | $7,800 – $9,000 |
| 200 people | $600/mo · $7,200/yr | $1,000/mo · $12,000/yr | $2,000/mo · $24,000/yr | $31,200 – $36,000 |
Three things jump out. First, the reward pool is the whole story: at 200 people, $24,000 of a $31,200 total is gift cards, and a $10 allowance is modest. Second, the tier choice matters more than it looks: a $2 per-seat step is a 67% increase on the entire software line, $4,800 a year at 200 people. Third, only the software line scales automatically. You choose the allowance; every offer letter raises the subscription without anyone re-approving it.
The Costs That Don't Appear on the Pricing Page
Gift cards are taxable compensation
In most jurisdictions, a gift card is cash-equivalent income regardless of amount. If you want a $100 reward to be worth $100 after withholding, you're grossing it up, and payroll needs to know the program exists. Better learned while designing reward tiers than when finance asks in Q4.
Inactive seats
Per-seat billing counts people, not participants. The half of your workspace that reads the feed and never gives a bonus costs as much as your most enthusiastic giver. Before renewal, divide the bill by the number of people who gave anything last month; that's your real cost per active user, and it's usually two to three times the sticker rate.
Fees, markup, and breakage
Catalog platforms can earn on the spread between what you fund and what the recipient receives, on unredeemed value, and on minimum deposits. We're not asserting Bonusly does any specific one of these; we're saying get the answers in writing, because they move more dollars than the per-seat rate. The one question that separates transparent vendors from the rest: "If I fund $100, how much value reaches the employee?"
Is Bonusly Worth It?
Usually, yes, if you'll actually use it, and that's the honest hinge. Employees who feel inadequately recognized are about twice as likely to say they'll quit within a year (Gallup/Workhuman), and organizations with strong recognition cultures see up to 31% lower voluntary turnover (Deloitte/Bersin). Replacing one employee costs roughly 33% of salary on the Work Institute's conservative estimate and 50–60% by SHRM's. For a 100-person company at $65k average salary and 15% turnover, replacement at 50% of salary runs about $487,500 a year. Against that, even the 200-person total above is small; one prevented resignation covers most of it. Run your own numbers in our cost of employee turnover calculator, and see the fuller case in is employee recognition software worth it.
The caveat is adoption. A points economy that goes quiet in month three returns nothing on either line, and the per-seat fee keeps billing while it's quiet. The question isn't "is $3 a seat reasonable" (it is); it's "will our team give bonuses on an ordinary Tuesday six months from now." Pilot for a full quarter and watch the give-rate.
Who Bonusly Is Right For
- Teams split across Slack and Microsoft Teams. Bonusly covers both, plus web and mobile. Slack-only tools (ours included) are disqualified here.
- Distributed companies that need a global catalog. If a teammate in Brazil needs their points to be worth something locally, Bonusly's international catalog is a genuine strength.
- People-ops teams that want to measure the program. Bonusly's participation and inclusion reporting is the most developed in the category (see Bonusly vs Nectar).
- Buyers who want to self-serve. No demo, no procurement cycle; rarer in this category than it should be, as Bonusly vs Kudos shows.
Bonusly Alternatives (Yes, Propsly Is Ours)
Disclosure up front, so you can weight this section accordingly: Propsly is our product. Verify everything on our pricing page and read the Propsly vs Bonusly comparison for the feature-by-feature version.
Propsly is Slack-native peer recognition with two prices. The free tier covers unlimited users: 200 props per person per month to give away via a single /props command, public leaderboards, and a recognition feed channel. Pro is $50 per month flat for the whole workspace, adding advanced analytics and automated monthly gift-card rewards. Against the table above, that's $600 a year at 200 people versus $7,200–$12,000 in Bonusly software. Who should not pick Propsly: anyone on Microsoft Teams, anyone who needs a global self-serve rewards catalog, and anyone who wants the swag store, challenges, and HR-suite depth the bigger platforms bundle. Those are real gaps, and if you need them, buy them.
Nectar is the closest like-for-like: the same points economy, per-seat pricing that generally lands below Bonusly's, and more bundled extras (anniversaries, challenges, an Amazon-backed store) with shallower analytics. Kudos is the enterprise-shaped option, quoted rather than published, built around values-based awards and HR reporting. HeyTaco is the lightweight five-tacos-a-day option, also per seat; our HeyTaco pricing breakdown runs the same math for it. The wider field is in our Bonusly alternatives roundup.
Whichever way you go, set the reward budget first, as a single number, because it decides whether a per-seat software fee is proportionate. Then get the fee questions answered in writing. Then pick. The expensive mistake in this category isn't choosing the wrong tool; it's spending a quarter choosing and another quarter not recognizing anyone.