Simple pricing.

How Connecting Odds is free when the incumbents charge $1,200+ a month

The honest answer is that the paid tools charge what they do because they can, not because the underlying technology is expensive. LinkedIn Recruiter costs roughly $800 per seat per month, Zoom's business tier lands near $150, Calendly and its peers add another $16, and an ATS with real messaging pushes another $200 onto the bill. Nothing in that stack costs the vendor anywhere near what they charge; the pricing reflects contract lock-in, a decade of consolidation, and a sales team that gets paid to protect the number.

Connecting Odds runs on modern serverless infrastructure with per-request billing. When a candidate messages a recruiter, the marginal cost to us is measured in cents, not dollars. When a company posts a job, our cost is a database row. The unit economics are compatible with a free product because they were designed to be. We do not sell your data, we do not run ads inside search results, and we do not gate messaging behind a paid tier. The product remains free because that is the point of the product.

The commercial future includes optional add-ons for the largest hiring teams (SSO, SCIM, advanced audit exports) that will be priced at a fraction of the incumbent. Everything a solo recruiter, a growing team of ten and a candidate looking for their next role needs will stay at zero cost.

The stack you probably run today, line by line

Start with sourcing. LinkedIn Recruiter Lite lists at $170 per month per seat; the full LinkedIn Recruiter that most in-house teams actually use starts near $800 per seat per month and often rises with negotiated commitments. That is $9,600 per seat per year for the ability to search for candidates and send them limited InMails.

Add the meeting layer. Zoom's Business plan is $18.32 per seat per month, but you rarely deploy it at one seat. A hiring team of five plus the shared conference room account comes in around $150 per month. Microsoft Teams via a Business Standard plan sits at roughly the same number once you account for the required Microsoft 365 seats.

Add scheduling. Calendly Standard is $12 per seat per month, Teams is $16, and Doodle Pro sits around $6.95. A five-person hiring team on Calendly Teams is $80 per month.

Add an ATS with usable messaging. Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and Workable land between $150 and $400 per month for a small hiring team, more once you add integrations and premium plans. Two hundred dollars is the common midpoint.

Total for a single recruiter: roughly $1,166 to $2,000 per month, or $14,000 to $24,000 per year, before any advertising credits or per-listing charges. Multiply by team size and the number is the second-largest line item on many hiring budgets, right after salaries.

• LinkedIn Recruiter: ~$800 per seat per month
• Zoom or Teams: ~$150 per hiring team per month
• Calendly or peers: ~$16 per seat per month
• ATS with messaging: ~$200 per hiring team per month
• Connecting Odds equivalent: $0 forever

Scenario: a solo recruiter hiring for one company

You are the only recruiter at a 30-person company. You post two open roles per month, message roughly 40 candidates per month across the two, and hold 15 first-round interviews. Your current stack is LinkedIn Recruiter Lite at $170, Zoom Pro at $16, Calendly Standard at $12 and a Workable Starter at $199. Monthly total: $397. Annual total: $4,764.

On Connecting Odds, the same workflow costs nothing. You post both roles from your company page, send matched candidates in-app messages, hold interviews inside the built-in video room and schedule them with your public booking URL. The saving is $4,764 per year for one recruiter, or roughly two months of a mid-market SaaS budget.

If you also currently run an anonymised outbound campaign (via SourceHub, HireEZ or similar), that adds another $1,200 to $3,000 per year. Connecting Odds' matching engine covers that use case natively.

Scenario: a ten-person hiring team

A team of ten recruiters and hiring managers at a series-B startup, hiring 40 roles this year. Current stack: five LinkedIn Recruiter seats at $800 each ($4,000/mo), Zoom Business for the team ($150/mo), Calendly Teams for five ($80/mo), Greenhouse for the hiring workflow ($400/mo). Monthly total: $4,630. Annual total: $55,560.

On Connecting Odds, the same team pays $0. The pipeline, messaging, calls, scheduling and candidate sourcing all live inside a single workspace. Extra spend if you keep specialist add-ons like a background-check provider is real, but the core hiring stack is free.

At $55k annually saved, that is a founding engineer's salary in most markets. Or it is 55 months of runway for whatever comes next.

Scenario: a 100-person recruiting function

A large enterprise recruiting function of 100 team members. Current stack likely includes an enterprise LinkedIn contract ($800 x 40 recruiter seats = $32,000/mo), Zoom Enterprise ($1,500/mo), Calendly enterprise ($200/mo across the org), and a full Greenhouse or Lever deployment ($4,000/mo including integrations). Monthly total: $37,700. Annual total: $452,400.

On Connecting Odds, the same team runs on $0 for the base product, plus (in a future release) an optional SSO/SCIM add-on that will price at a small fraction of the incumbent. Even with generous assumptions for the enterprise add-on, savings land north of $400,000 per year.

That is not marginal; that is a strategic budget conversation.

Total cost of ownership: what the sticker price hides

SaaS bills are just the start. Every additional tool in a recruiter's stack has a hidden cost that shows up as slower cycles and worse candidate experience.

Time lost to context switching: switching between four tools costs an average of 4.5 minutes per switch (University of California, Irvine research). A recruiter who touches four tools 30 times per day loses 2.25 hours per day, or roughly a whole business day per week, to purely coordination work.

Onboarding cost: teaching a new hire the workflow across a four-tool stack takes 8 to 12 hours of training. On a single-tool workflow, it takes under 2.

Integration debt: each connector between tools breaks on average twice a year. Fixing broken sync between an ATS and LinkedIn takes 6 to 20 hours of engineering time per incident.

Attribution gaps: when your calls happen in Zoom and your notes live in Greenhouse, the record of what was said is always partial. On a single-tool workflow, the call, the notes and the pipeline are the same record.

• 4.5 minutes lost per tool switch
• Onboarding cut from 8-12 hours to under 2
• Integration debt eliminated
• One canonical candidate record
• Zero SaaS bill overhead

Detailed comparison: Connecting Odds vs LinkedIn Recruiter

LinkedIn Recruiter is the dominant sourcing product because of its data set, not because of its interface. The workflow is: run a boolean search, filter, save profiles to a project, send an InMail (limited per month), wait days for a reply, then hand the candidate to your ATS.

Connecting Odds replaces the search with mutual matching, which changes the response rate dramatically. Candidates on Connecting Odds who mark themselves open reply within 24 hours 60% of the time. LinkedIn InMail industry benchmarks land at 10 to 25%. The math on your team's calendar is a 3x improvement in productive first replies per hour of recruiter work.

The gap that remains is data set size: LinkedIn has more profiles today. Every month, that gap narrows.

Detailed comparison: Connecting Odds vs Zoom / Teams

Zoom and Teams are excellent, general-purpose meeting products with a rich feature set: webinars, breakout rooms, live transcription, dial-in numbers. For a hiring interview, most of that is unused.

Connecting Odds' voice and video is optimised for the one-to-one and small-panel format that hiring uses. There is no 40-minute cap on the free tier because there is no free tier - it is all free. There is no meeting ID to share because the meeting exists inside a conversation you and the candidate already have.

For all-hands and webinar scenarios, Zoom remains the right tool. For candidate conversations, Connecting Odds removes one entire tool and one entire subscription.

Detailed comparison: Connecting Odds vs Calendly

Calendly does one thing extremely well: it publishes your availability. The trade is that your candidate has to visit a third-party site to book, and once booked the meeting lives in a separate product from where you actually talk.

Connecting Odds publishes availability as a public URL under connectingodds.com/in/your-slug/book, syncs with the same Google or Outlook calendar Calendly does, and drops the meeting into the same product where the conversation, the resume and the pipeline all live. Round-robin, collective and event-type routing are supported. The saving compounds because you also stop paying for a separate scheduling account.

Detailed comparison: Connecting Odds vs Greenhouse / Lever / Ashby

Modern ATS products are sophisticated. Greenhouse in particular has excellent interview kits, scorecards, and reporting. Lever's nurture campaigns are strong. Ashby's analytics are best-in-class.

The Connecting Odds workspace covers the shared 80% of ATS functionality: pipelines, notes, mentions, stage timers, application intake, audit trails, member roles, calendar sync. If your team relies on advanced scorecards, structured interview kits or bespoke reporting, keep your ATS - Connecting Odds integrates via webhooks. If your team is small enough that the ATS is 'the tool where we track candidates', Connecting Odds replaces it entirely at zero cost.

What free means for the candidate side

Every incumbent recruiting stack is built to be paid by employers, but candidates pay too, in time. A LinkedIn Premium Career subscription is $30 per month and does not materially improve outbound outcomes. Resume review services charge $150 to $600. Interview coaching platforms charge $200 per session.

On Connecting Odds, candidates get their profile, resume tools, application tracking, real-time messaging with recruiters, scheduling, and voice / video calls for free. The AI-powered resume feedback tool is free. The salary explorer is free. The market compensation data is free. There is no paid tier that unlocks a hidden inbox.

The economic transfer here is real: every dollar a candidate does not spend on a Premium subscription is a dollar that stays in their pocket during the exact period of life when their salary is between jobs.

What might one day cost money

To be transparent about the future: three categories of feature might one day carry a price. First, enterprise identity add-ons like SSO, SCIM provisioning and advanced audit exports for organisations that require them. Second, promoted employer branding on the /jobs board, priced by the click and clearly labelled as promoted. Third, advanced AI features that consume expensive model inference (bulk-generation of tailored job descriptions, for example).

None of the current core features - matching, messaging, calls, scheduling, pipelines, applications, company pages - are on the list of things that will ever be paywalled. If we ever change that, we will announce the change well in advance and grandfather existing usage.

• SSO / SCIM enterprise add-ons (future, opt-in)
• Promoted employer branding (labelled, per-click)
• AI-inference-heavy bulk features (opt-in)
• Everything else stays $0 forever
• Any change announced well in advance

Pricing FAQ

Q: How can you afford to be free? Modern infrastructure has different unit economics than the incumbents' 2005-era pricing model. We describe our reasoning above.

Q: Do you sell my data? No. We do not sell profile data, message content, or activity to any third party. Our data-processing addendum is available on request.

Q: Do you run ads? No. There is no advertising surface anywhere in the product. Search results and match rankings have no paid placement.

Q: What if I need to move away? Export your data in a machine-readable format from settings, close your account, and every trace is deleted after the 30-day grace window.

Q: Do you offer a discount for non-profits? Not applicable; the product is free.

Q: What about volume pricing? Not applicable; the product is free at any volume.

Q: What happens when you raise a Series A and need to make money? See 'What might one day cost money' above.

What to do with the budget you free up

Cutting $50,000 out of a hiring team's SaaS bill is not a rounding error. Where does the money go? For most series-A and series-B startups, the answer is one of three places. First, into a signing bonus pool that lets you close a shortlist of critical hires that were slipping out of reach on total-comp. Second, into a targeted referral programme where employees earn a real bonus for bringing in candidates who make it past a defined stage. Third, into a small but visible improvement to candidate experience: a same-day thank-you gift for finalists, a professional-quality assessment tool for a specific role, or an accessibility audit of the careers page.

For enterprise teams, savings of $400,000 or more compound into new headcount, into a dedicated diversity-sourcing partnership, into an ATS overhaul that was previously off the table, or into a formal candidate-experience programme with published metrics. The best use of the money depends on where your bottleneck is.

The point is that the incumbent tool budget is not a fixed cost of doing business. It is a discretionary spend that historically had no alternative. Now it does.

The risk of switching, honestly discussed

Every switch has friction. New workflows, new data model, new URL for your team to remember. We are honest about it because we would rather you switch with clear eyes than churn out three months in.

Data-migration friction is real. If your existing ATS has three years of candidate history, moving it wholesale is a project. We recommend a parallel-running pattern: keep the old system for existing candidates, run new roles on Connecting Odds, and let attrition of the old pipeline handle the retirement over 6 to 12 months.

Team-adoption friction is smaller than you would expect. Because the workflow is closer to how recruiters describe their work than how any of the incumbents model it (a conversation, a call, a decision), new users typically report they were productive by end-of-week.

Integration friction depends on your stack. If you rely on a specific ATS's proprietary scorecards, keep the ATS and use Connecting Odds' webhooks. If your ATS is 'the place where candidates live', Connecting Odds can replace it entirely.

Commitment vs flexibility: what the incumbents lock you into

The typical LinkedIn Recruiter contract is annual, invoiced upfront, and comes with steep discounts for multi-year commitments. Ashby, Greenhouse and Lever offer monthly, but their annual pricing is 20 to 30 percent lower. Zoom Business is monthly cancel-anytime but with a per-seat commitment.

Connecting Odds has no contract. If you decide the product does not work for you, you close your account and every trace of your data is deleted within 30 days. There is no negotiation with a sales rep, no early-termination penalty and no data-portability charge.

This is the underappreciated part of a free product: it aligns incentives. If we cannot keep users happy, we do not keep users. Every one of our team members feels that alignment on a daily basis.

How to measure whether the switch is working

Define success metrics before you switch, not after. Suggested metrics: time-to-first-interview per role (from posting to first candidate call), reply rate to first outreach (should improve dramatically), interview-to-offer ratio (should hold or improve), cost-per-hire (should collapse), and time-to-fill (should hold or improve).

Run the metrics on a two-role, two-recruiter pilot for 30 days. Compare against the same window last year on your incumbent stack. Publish the numbers to the hiring team. Extend the pilot only if the metrics support it.

We are happy to help set up the pilot and interpret the numbers. Email support@connectingodds.com with 'pilot' in the subject.

Cost per hire, worked example

Traditional stack, mid-sized team hiring 40 roles per year. Recruiter time at $60 per hour, 12 hours per hire (industry benchmark). Tools at $55,560 per year (see scenario-10). Advertising / sourcing credits at $8,000 per year. Total tool + labour = 40 hires x 12 hours x $60 = $28,800 in recruiter labour, plus $63,560 in tools and credits = $92,360. Cost per hire = $2,309.

Same team on Connecting Odds. Recruiter time down to 8 hours per hire because the workflow is single-tool. 40 x 8 x $60 = $19,200 in labour. Tools at $0. Advertising / sourcing credits at $4,000 (some employer branding budget remains useful). Total = $23,200. Cost per hire = $580.

The difference is $1,729 per hire, or $69,160 per year on 40 hires. That is a fully-loaded new employee at most mid-market comp bands.

Numbers vary by market, role, and team. The direction of the arrow does not.

Hidden costs the incumbents do not advertise

Per-listing surcharges. LinkedIn's per-job promoted-listing pricing is separate from the recruiter seat and lands between $150 and $500 per role in mid-market pricing tiers. Indeed's sponsored-post pricing works similarly.

Data-export fees. Extracting your candidate database from certain ATS products carries a one-time fee that can reach into the thousands of dollars, depending on the vendor and the volume.

Integration-per-seat charges. Some ATS platforms charge per-seat pricing for advanced integrations (e.g. LinkedIn Recruiter System Connect), stacking on top of both the ATS seat and the LinkedIn seat.

Analytics add-ons. Standard reporting is usually included; the reports you actually want (source-of-hire, quality-of-hire, funnel conversion) frequently sit behind an analytics upgrade priced at 20 to 40 percent of the base contract.

Support tier gating. Best-effort support is included; response-time SLAs and dedicated success managers sit behind a premium-support contract that can add 10 to 25 percent to the base.

• Per-listing surcharges $150-$500
• Data-export fees at end of contract
• Per-seat integration charges
• Analytics reports behind an upgrade
• Response-time SLAs behind premium support

How to defend the switch to your finance team

Finance teams evaluate SaaS on three axes: cost, risk, and lock-in. Connecting Odds compares favourably on every axis, but the conversation goes better when you show the work.

On cost: publish the line-by-line comparison of the incumbent stack vs Connecting Odds and label the savings clearly. The scenario walk-throughs above are reusable templates.

On risk: highlight the data-portability guarantees (two-click export, 30-day grace on deletion), the security posture (TLS 1.3, AES-256, Argon2id, RLS), and the compliance stance (GDPR, CCPA, published sub-processors).

On lock-in: emphasise that Connecting Odds has no contract, no multi-year commitment and no early-termination fee. If the pilot fails, you close the workspace and every trace is gone in 30 days.

This framing usually wins the room. If your finance team wants specific documentation (DPA, SOC-adjacent controls, sub-processor lists), request them at legal@connectingodds.com.

Migration support, for the day you switch

We do not charge for migration support because migration should be a decision on the merits, not gated by professional-services fees. For teams switching wholesale, we offer a free 30-minute onboarding call to walk through workspace setup, member invitations, calendar integrations and pipeline templates for your industry.

For teams migrating candidate history from an existing ATS, we provide CSV import templates for common vendors (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, SmartRecruiters) plus a bulk-import endpoint for larger datasets. Data privacy caveats apply: you are responsible for having the legal basis to move candidate data from one system to another, and for notifying candidates where required.

For teams that want to run in parallel for a quarter, we recommend a phased approach: new roles on Connecting Odds, existing pipelines run to completion on the legacy system, member training on the new workflow during the parallel period.

The closing pitch

Free is a strong word and we use it carefully. The current core of Connecting Odds - matching, messaging, voice, video, scheduling, applications, pipelines and company pages - is free at every scale, for every user, without a trial that ends or a feature that gets gated in the next release. The commitment is public, dated, and reversible only with a year of advance notice and grandfathered access for every existing account.

Everything you would otherwise pay $1,200 to $2,000 per month for, per recruiter, per month, lives inside one workspace at zero cost. If you have not tried it because 'free' sounded implausible, try it. The economics work because the underlying infrastructure is genuinely cheap, not because of an accounting trick.

If the switch works, tell your peers. If it does not, tell us why. Either outcome is useful, and both are welcome.