Stop Paying $600 a Seat to Run a 40-Person Firm.

$600 a Seat to Run a 40-Person Firm Is a Choice

The average professional services firm under 100 people is running Salesforce, HubSpot, a project tool, a resourcing tool, a time tracker, a billing system, and a couple of AI point solutions. Fully loaded, that is $500–$700 per seat per month before the human cost of keeping any of it in sync.

For a 40-person firm, that is $250K–$335K a year in software. And it still doesn’t tell you which project is about to slip, which client is about to expand, or which consultant is about to burn out.

One platform. Client, project, pipeline, and delivery in one graph. Under $100 a seat.

The Real Job of a Services Firm Platform

A services firm doesn’t need seven systems. It needs one place where the pipeline, the project, the client, and the person all live together — because in a services business, they are the same thing.

• Pipeline → project without a handoff. When a deal closes, the project already exists. Same account, same context, same team.
• Utilization and margin visible in real time. Every consultant, every project, every week. Not in a spreadsheet that’s two months stale.
• Client health as a first-class object. Not a hunch. Not a QBR slide. A live signal you can act on.

What Herd Replaces in a Services Firm

Herd is purpose-built for firms that sell time and expertise. It replaces the CRM, the project management tool, the resourcing spreadsheet, the client portal, and most of the AI point solutions bolted onto them.

The CRM (Salesforce or HubSpot)

Pipeline, accounts, contacts, forecasting, and expansion tracking — with AI ranking of which accounts to touch this week and why.

The PM tool (Asana, Monday, ClickUp)

Projects, tasks, milestones, deliverables — connected to the account they belong to and the consultants delivering them.

Resourcing and utilization (spreadsheets, Float, Kantata)

Who is working on what, at what utilization, with what remaining capacity. Updated automatically from actual work happening in the platform.

The AI point solutions

Meeting summaries, proposal drafts, client email triage, delivery status roll-ups — all built into the platform, all working against your actual data.

The Math for a 40-Person Firm

Take a typical 40-person consulting or agency shop:

• Salesforce or HubSpot at $150–$300 per seat: $72K–$144K a year
• Project management at $25 per seat: $12K a year
• Resourcing and time tracking at $40–$80 per seat: $19K–$38K a year
• Meeting AI, proposal AI, and adjacent tools: $40K–$80K a year
• One full-time ops person keeping it all in sync: $80K–$120K a year

Total: $220K–$395K a year. Herd delivers all of the above for a fraction of that — typically under $50K a year fully loaded for a firm this size.

Who This Is For

This is for founders and managing partners of services firms between 15 and 100 people who are tired of paying enterprise software prices for tools that don’t talk to each other.

• You bill by time, project, retainer, or outcome — and you need to see utilization and margin in real time.
• You have at least three overlapping systems that all claim to be the source of truth.
• You would rather invest that budget in your consultants, your clients, or your marketing.