Platoon Manager
Software aimed at units is usually priced for installations, which is how a roster for one company ends up quoted like a program of record.
Three models you will run into
Enterprise contracts are priced per installation or per brigade, involve a sales cycle, and are not something a first sergeant can start on a Tuesday. They make sense when a whole organization is buying.
Per-unit pricing charges for the company regardless of how many leaders use it. Simple to reason about, and it punishes you for adding the squad leaders who most need access.
Per-account pricing charges for each leader who signs in. It scales with the people actually using it, and it means you can start with two accounts and add the rest once it has proven itself.
What to check before the price
- Can you start without talking to anybody? If evaluating requires a call, you will not evaluate it.
- Can you export everything and leave? If not, the price is the entry fee for a room you cannot walk out of.
- Does it cost more to add the people who need it most?
- What happens when you stop paying? Losing access is normal. Losing the data is not.
The hidden cost is the rollout
A tool that needs training, an account provisioning process and a briefing has a real cost before it saves a minute. For a company-sized unit the practical test is whether a squad leader can be handed a link and be useful in the same formation.
Anything requiring a scheduled onboarding session will be adopted by the two people who attended and nobody else, and it will be abandoned the next time the company changes leadership.
Ask what happens at change of command
Units turn over. The question worth asking is what the incoming first sergeant inherits: the data, the accounts, and the ability to remove the people who left. If access is tied to one person's account, the tool becomes a problem the moment they PCS.
Compare it against what it replaces
The honest comparison is not against a free spreadsheet. It is against the minutes the formation runs long, the detail that got assigned to somebody on leave, and the report that took twenty minutes to reconcile. Those have a cost that nobody invoices for.
If a tool saves ten minutes a morning across a company, decide whether that is worth roughly the price of a coffee per leader per month, and make the call on that basis rather than on a feature list.
Related
Start it yourself, today
Platoon Manager is 2.99 a month per leader, or 19.99 a year, with a 14-day trial that needs no card and no sales call. Export your whole organization to a file whenever you want. Put one platoon in and see if it holds up.