A virtual assistant (VA) sits inside someone else's software. The licence question that decides the bill is straightforward: does the seat belong to the client's workspace or to the assistant's own? Show the published prices on both sides, then run the same caseload through each model. The difference is real money and it is the reason this article exists.
There is a second meter in the list that does not behave like the others. Mailchimp prices by the contacts held in one client's list, not by the person doing the sending. A VA serving six clients pays for six contact lists. That single fact changes which tools make sense for an assistant whose roster turns over.
The virtual assistant market is unusual in one way that most comparison pages ignore. A VA is rarely the principal user of any single tool. They are a guest in other people's CRMs, help desks, inboxes and marketing accounts. That changes which line on the price list gets paid, and by whom, and how the cost moves as the assistant takes on or loses a client.
Two billing models for the same work
Most professional software is priced one of two ways. The seat-based tools charge per person logging in. The contact-based tools charge per record held in a single workspace. Both models appear in the kit a virtual assistant needs day to day. They look similar on a price page. They behave very differently once the assistant serves more than one client.
| Tool | What it does for a VA | Meter | Paid tiers (USD) | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zoho CRM | Pipeline, contact records, deal stages for each client | User | 14 / 23 / 40 / 52 | Per user, billed annually |
| Pipedrive | Lightweight pipeline and activity tracking | Seat | 14 / 39 / 59 / 79 | Per seat, billed annually |
| Front | Shared inbox and help desk for client email | Seat | 25 / 65 / 105 | Per seat, billed annually |
| Asyntai | Customer chat agent answering visitor questions on each client's site | Message | 39 / 139 / 449 | Per workspace, by message volume |
| Mailchimp | Email campaigns and automations | Contact | EUR 11.28 / 17.35 / 303.69 | Per contacts held, billed monthly in euro |
The Asyntai row is ours; read it as a disclosure. The three published self-serve Asyntai tiers are $39, $139 and $449 a month, with a free plan capped at 50 messages, and an Enterprise tier sold by signed order form. Prices on the other rows are taken from each vendor's own pricing page on the dates in the sources block.
Three of the four vendor tools in the table charge per seat or per user. The fourth charges per contact held. Asyntai charges per message handled, which sits outside both models. That is the structure the rest of this article works from.
What a seat actually costs a VA
Seat-based pricing is the simplest model to misunderstand. The price is per person, but the person logging in is usually the assistant, not the client. Two consequences follow.
First, the client does not always pay for the seat. Some clients add the VA as a user inside their own workspace and pay themselves. Others ask the VA to bring their own tools and reimburse later, or not at all. The same seat can end up on either invoice depending on the contract.
Second, one VA serving six clients can mean six seats. The assistant logs into each client's CRM separately, because most CRMs do not let one human hold six separate user records inside the same workspace without paying for each one. If the client is paying, the bill is theirs and it does not scale with the VA. If the VA is paying, the bill scales linearly with the number of clients, and that is the case where the maths gets uncomfortable.
That figure uses the $23 monthly Professional price from Zoho CRM billed annually. The same arithmetic on Pipedrive's $39 Growth tier comes out at $468 a year per client, or $2,808 across six clients. Pipedrive has no free tier, so the floor is higher from the first client.
The point is not which CRM is cheaper. The point is that a VA buying per-seat tools out of pocket pays for the same person six times, once per client. A client buying the seat inside their own workspace pays only once, for their own VA. The model is identical at the vendor; the cost is not.
What the help desk seat does to the bill
Front is a shared inbox and help desk tool priced by seat. It is the kind of product a VA uses to triage a client's email queue without logging in as the client. Same seat arithmetic, higher per-seat price.
The Starter tier at $25 a seat is capped at 10 seats, which is the only published ceiling on any of these plans. A solo VA serving six clients never hits it. But the Starter tier is also where the conversation-based pricing starts. Autopilot from $0.05 per conversation charges per resolved chat, which is a usage meter bolted onto a seat meter, not a replacement for it.
The contact-based meter, and why it is different
Mailchimp is the one tool in this list that does not charge for the person doing the work. It charges for the contacts held inside one workspace. The price goes up as the contact list grows. The same VA sitting at the same keyboard pays more in month six than in month one if the client's list grew in between.
The Mailchimp published numbers at the 0 to 500 contact bracket, in euro as the pricing page shows them:
| Tier | Published monthly price | What the price is set by | Meter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mailchimp Essentials | EUR 11.28 | 0 to 500 contacts, then a higher bracket | Contacts held |
| Mailchimp Standard | EUR 17.35 | 0 to 500 contacts, then a higher bracket | Contacts held |
| Mailchimp Premium | EUR 303.69 | 0 to 500 contacts, then a higher bracket | Contacts held |
| Mailchimp Free | EUR 0 | 250 contacts, 500 sends a month, 250 a day | Contacts held |
| Asyntai Starter | $39 | 800 messages a month and 2 dashboard seats | Messages sent |
The Mailchimp column is quoted in euro exactly as its pricing page shows them, checked 6 September 2026. The meter is contacts held, not emails sent. Paid brackets start at 501 contacts and the rate rises as the contact count rises. Mailchimp's free plan covers 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, capped at 250 sends a day.
For a VA serving six clients, the contact-based meter has a different shape of cost. Each client needs their own Mailchimp account because contact lists cannot be pooled across unrelated businesses. Six clients at the 0 to 500 contact bracket on the Standard tier is six separate Mailchimp workspaces, each billed in euro.
The arithmetic is the same shape as the seat-based tools: one assistant serving multiple clients pays the per-workspace price multiple times. The reason this meter behaves differently is what happens when a client leaves. With a seat-based tool, the VA simply stops logging in and the next month's seat is dropped. With a contact-based tool, the contact list is the client's property, but if the VA is the account holder, migrating it out is a separate project and the workspace itself remains billable until it is closed.
The model that does not multiply with clients
Asyntai is priced per message, not per seat and not per contact held. The published self-serve tiers are $39, $139 and $449 a month, with a free plan at 50 messages. Enterprise is sold by signed order form and does not appear in self-serve pricing.
The seat counts on the four self-serve tiers are one, two, three and ten. The message allowances are 50, 800, 15,000 and 50,000. The seat is a control surface rather than a meter: the Pro plan lets up to ten people in one workspace see the same configuration and the same audit log. The thing that decides the bill is the number of messages the agent handles, which is a property of the visitor traffic on the client's site, not of the assistant's roster.
For a VA running chat on each client's website, the per-workspace cost is what matters. Six clients each on the $39 Starter tier is six workspaces at $39 a month, billed to whoever holds the account. Adding a seventh client means a seventh workspace, not a seventh seat inside someone else's tool.
The arithmetic looks similar. The difference is in what scales and what does not. With Asyntai, the assistant scales by adding workspaces, one per client, and the bill scales by the total message volume across them. Adding a second assistant inside one workspace does not double the bill, because the plan is the plan. With a seat-based CRM, adding a second VA inside one client's workspace doubles the seat count for that client and doubles the cost on that line of the invoice.
Putting one caseload through both models
The clearest way to see the difference is to run the same caseload through both billing models and write down the answer. Take a VA serving six clients, each client paying for the VA to manage a CRM, a help desk and a chat agent. Assume the VA buys the tools and recharges the client at cost.
Now the same caseload with the chat agent priced by message rather than seat, and with the VA working inside each client's own CRM and help desk rather than buying separate licences.
The seat-based stack costs the VA $6,336 a year before Mailchimp, plus six Mailchimp workspaces billed in euro. The workspace-based stack moves the seat costs off the VA's invoice entirely and leaves $2,808 a year in Asyntai. The Mailchimp workspaces remain either way, because contact-based pricing does not collapse when the workspace changes hands.
This is the answer to the licence question at the top of the page. The published prices look comparable line by line. The annual bill for the same caseload depends entirely on whose invoice the seats sit on.
Task management tools for the VA themselves
Most VAs also need a tool that is theirs, not the client's. That is task management: tracking what is due for which client, in which workspace, on which day. The CRM and help desk tools above all include some task handling, but the VA-specific question is whether the tool charges per seat or per workspace, and whether the client's data ever enters it.
Task management tools built for assistants usually price per seat, which is the right shape for a tool that is genuinely the VA's own. The cost is the VA's cost. There is no client to pass it to. The mistake is using a per-seat task tool to hold client work that the client should be able to see, because that pushes the VA onto a more expensive tier and leaves the client without visibility.
The clean split is: the client pays for seats inside their own CRM, their own help desk and their own chat agent workspace, and the VA pays for their own task tool out of retainer. Each side pays for what only they can use.
What changes the answer
The numbers above assume six clients on the lower published tiers. Change any of the inputs and the picture moves.
Fewer clients. Three clients halves every multiplier in the seat-based stack, and brings the workspace-based stack down to $1,404 a year. The crossover where workspace-based becomes clearly cheaper is somewhere around four clients, because below that the per-workspace overhead does not have time to amortise.
Larger CRMs. Zoho Enterprise is $40 a user a month on annual billing. Six clients on Enterprise moves the CRM line alone to $2,880 a year. The seat-based model does not get cheaper at scale; it gets more expensive.
Front's seat cap. Front Starter caps at 10 seats. A VA inside a single client on Starter is fine. A VA whose client wants to add five internal staff as well is already at six seats inside one workspace, which is still under the cap but uses most of it. Growth and Scale remove the cap but raise the per-seat price to $65 and $105 respectively.
Contact list growth. The Mailchimp bracket rises with the contact count. Six clients at 5,000 contacts each is a very different monthly bill from six clients at 500 each, and the price per workspace is set by the largest list, not averaged across them.
Message volume on chat. Asyntai Starter allows 800 messages a month. A client site that gets more than that needs the $139 Standard tier. The meter is per workspace, so the question is how chatty each client's visitors are, not how many clients the VA has.
The mistake most VAs make
The common mistake is to start with a per-seat tool the client already has and treat the VA's access as a free extra. Sometimes it is. Often it is not, because the VA needs their own login, their own view of the pipeline, and the ability to work without occupying a named seat on the client's headcount plan. Once the VA has their own login in each of six clients' workspaces, the bill is six seats, and the question of who pays for them has to be in the contract from day one.
The second mistake is to assume Mailchimp's contact-based pricing will behave like seat-based pricing once the client list stops growing. It does not. The contact list is the bill. A dormant client with a 4,000-contact list still costs the VA the per-workspace rate until the workspace is closed, and closing the workspace is a separate piece of admin that has to be remembered.
The third mistake is to buy a single Enterprise-tier chat agent and share it across clients. Asyntai Enterprise is a signed order form with a negotiated message allowance. It is sold as one contract for one workspace. Sharing it across unrelated clients means sharing visitor data across businesses that should not see each other's traffic, which is a separate problem from the price.
How Asyntai fits
Asyntai is an AI chat agent that answers visitor questions on a website. It is installed with a script tag, or through Code Injection on Squarespace. For a VA, the relevant property is per-workspace pricing with a per-message meter that has nothing to do with how many assistants log in.
Per-tab permissions and per-website scoping let one VA hold several client workspaces in the same account without cross-bleeding. SSO via OIDC, including Entra and Google, is available on Pro and above, which matters when the client wants the VA to log in through the client's own identity provider. PII redaction, the separate output classifier and the append-only audit log are enterprise features, sold on signed order form.
For the caseload in this article, the workspace-based model puts the CRM and help desk seats on the client's invoice, where they belong, and leaves the VA paying $2,808 a year for chat across six clients on Starter. The same caseload on the seat-based model puts $6,336 a year on the VA's invoice before Mailchimp, with Mailchimp billed separately in euro on top.
Asyntai's Starter plan is $39 a month for 800 messages and two seats, with per-website scoping built in. The Standard plan at $139 a month covers 15,000 messages and three seats. Pro at $449 a month covers 50,000 messages, ten seats, SSO via OIDC and configurable chat retention. Enterprise is sold on signed order form. Start with the free plan at 50 messages if you want to see the behaviour on one client site before paying.
Sources
Zoho CRM prices from its own pricing page, checked 4 September 2026. Pipedrive prices from its own pricing page, checked 4 September 2026. Front prices from its own pricing page, checked 4 September 2026. Mailchimp prices in euro from its own pricing page, checked 6 September 2026. Asyntai plan figures and capability scope from asyntai.com, checked September 2026.
Software tools for virtual assistants at a glance
Below is a compact checklist of the categories of tools used by virtual assistants, with the published prices from each vendor's own pricing page as they appear above. The point is the meter, not the feature list.
- CRM. Per-user pricing. Zoho CRM from $14 to $52 a user a month on annual billing; Pipedrive from $14 to $79 a seat a month on annual billing.
- Help desk and shared inbox. Per-seat pricing. Front from $25 to $105 a seat a month on annual billing, with Autopilot from $0.05 per conversation and Copilot at $20 a seat on top.
- Email marketing. Per-contact pricing, billed in euro. Mailchimp from EUR 11.28 a month at the 0 to 500 contact bracket, with a free plan at 250 contacts.
- Website chat agent. Per-message pricing per workspace. Asyntai from $39 a month for 800 messages, with a free plan at 50 messages and an Enterprise tier on signed order form.
- Task management. Per-seat pricing for the VA's own stack. The CRM and help desk tools above include some task handling, so a standalone tool is optional.
What "best software for virtual assistants" actually depends on
Searches for the best software for virtual assistants return lists with no working behind them. The answer for any given VA depends on three things nobody else knows: how many clients the assistant has, who pays for the seats, and whether the client's contact list is growing. The two billing models that matter are per seat and per contact. The third billing model, per message, behaves differently again and is the one Asyntai sits on.
A solo VA with two clients on per-seat tools pays for two of everything. The same VA with six clients pays for six of everything. A VA whose clients hold the seats inside their own workspaces pays for none of the CRM and help desk seats, and only pays for the tools the assistant genuinely owns. The arithmetic above shows the difference on a published caseload. The same arithmetic on any other caseload works the same way, with different inputs.
Software tools for virtual assistants are not hard to compare on price. The hard part is deciding whose invoice each line belongs on, and writing that into the contract before the seats get provisioned.