What a two-person team pays for a business VPN
Seven of the 19 published per-user plans in this dataset bill a minimum number of users. Four of those seven also carry a fixed monthly charge, two of them required (checked 2026-08-21).
For a team of two, NordLayer Core's advertised $11.00 per user becomes $47.50 per user — 4.3 times the figure on the pricing card.
A per-user price is the amount a provider charges for one user for one month, before any minimum user count or fixed monthly charge is applied. That is the number on every pricing card, and the number that comparison tables sort by. It is the price you pay only when your bill is that figure multiplied by your people, and for a small team buying secure remote access it often is not.
Two published fields break it. Both sit on the vendor's own pricing page, in normal type.
Why is the advertised price not what a small team pays?
Because the minimum user count and the fixed monthly charge are both applied before your headcount is. A minimum means you buy seats you do not have. A fixed charge — a dedicated gateway, a dedicated-IP server, a base platform fee — is a flat amount each month that does not shrink with the team. Divide the total by the people who will actually use it and the per-user figure moves.
Every table on this site is built with one formula, printed in full on the Method page:
Which providers bill a minimum number of users?
Only three of the 13 vendors that publish a readable price bill a minimum on a plan that also shows a per-user figure: NordLayer, GoodAccess and uTunnel, each stating five users (checked 2026-08-21). Between them they account for all seven of the priced per-user plans with a minimum. VyprVPN Business and OpenVPN CloudConnexa also state minimums, but with no per-user figure beside them, so neither carries a computed price here.
The table below is every plan in this dataset that bills a minimum, with its fixed charge and what a two-person team pays.
| Vendor and plan | Advertised per user | Billing basis | Minimum users | Fixed monthly charge | A team of two pays, per user |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NordLayer Premium | $14.00 | monthly | 5 | $40.00 dedicated-IP server, required | $55.00 |
| NordLayer Core | $11.00 | monthly | 5 | $40.00 dedicated-IP server, required | $47.50 |
| GoodAccess Premium | $11.00 | annual | 5 | $49.00 dedicated gateway, optional | $27.50 |
| NordLayer Lite | $8.00 | monthly | 5 | None published | $20.00 |
| uTunnel Standard | $8.00 | monthly | 5 | Unconfirmed — none readable on the page | $20.00 |
| GoodAccess Essential | $7.00 | annual | 5 | $49.00 dedicated gateway, optional | $17.50 |
| uTunnel Basic | $6.00 | monthly | 5 | Unconfirmed — none readable on the page | $15.00 |
Scroll sideways on a phone.
What does a two-person team actually pay per user?
$47.50 per user on NordLayer Core, against the $11.00 on the card. Set that beside the two cheapest plans at the same team size.
| Plan | Advertised per user | Billing basis | A team of two pays, per user |
|---|---|---|---|
| NordLayer Core | $11.00 | monthly | $47.50 |
| Twingate Teams | $4.25 | annual | $4.25 |
| Firezone Team | $4.16 | annual | $4.16 |
On the card, NordLayer Core is under three times Twingate Teams. On a two-person bill it is nine to eleven times, depending on which contract you compare. The ranking by advertised price and the ranking by what a small team pays are two different rankings.
In money: two people on NordLayer Core is $95.00 a month, $1,140 a year. The same two on Twingate Teams billed annually is $102 a year, on Firezone Team $99.84. The cheaper bill is roughly a tenth of the more expensive one, on cards that are three times apart.
A required fixed charge with no minimum can distort further, though not into a number that belongs in a per-user column. ZeroTier Scale is a $179.00 flat monthly base plan including 100 devices, with further devices at $1.80 each, so a two-person team pays $179.00 and nothing more — $89.50 per user against a card showing $1.80 (checked 2026-08-21). That $1.80 is a per-device overage rate, not a seat price, which is why ZeroTier sits in no per-user ranking here; per user, per device, per server explains the rule.
Eleven of the 24 vendors on this site publish no readable per-user price at all — seven ask you to contact sales, and four publish a page we could not read a figure from (checked 2026-08-21).
A note against our own interest. The two cheapest plans for a team of two are Firezone Team and Twingate Teams. Firezone has no affiliate program recorded in our payouts file, and Twingate's Partner Alliance is for resellers, not publishers like us (both checked 2026-08-21), so we would earn nothing if you chose either. NordLayer and GoodAccess, the most expensive at that size, both run programs open to publishers. We hold no approved link with any vendor as of 2026-08-23.
At 10 or 50 users, what is left of the gap?
Not the minimum. Above five users it stops binding and costs nothing. What is left is the required fixed charge, and it shrinks only because more people divide it.
That is why every table here prints a team size at the top, and why the calculator asks for yours before it ranks anything.
Is this a trick?
No. Every figure above is published by the vendor on its own page, next to the price. Nobody is hiding a minimum. Comparison sites, and the search results that quote them, carry a single per-user number because a single number sorts. The minimum and the fixed charge are the two fields that get dropped, and they are the two that decide the answer for a small team.
What we could not confirm: we have read only the self-serve pricing pages, so a negotiated quote is unconfirmed for every vendor here. Annual per-user rates are unconfirmed for NordLayer, uTunnel, Tailscale and OpenVPN CloudConnexa, which publish a monthly figure only, and for Firezone. Minimum user counts are unconfirmed for Tailscale, Twingate, OpenVPN CloudConnexa and the Firezone Team plan, which state none. uTunnel's fixed charges are unconfirmed. Every row in data.json carries its own list.
How do you check a price you are looking at now?
Only four fields decide it, and all four are on the page in front of you.
- Check the billing basis. The lowest figure on a card is usually the annual rate. In this dataset the monthly rate runs 18 to 29 percent above it (checked 2026-08-21). Compare annual against annual, never one against the other.
- Find the minimum. Usually beside the plan name or in the checkout, phrased as "minimum 5 users".
- Find the fixed charge and check whether it is required. A dedicated IP marked optional is not a cost. The same charge marked required is.
- Multiply properly: advertised price × max(your team, the minimum), plus the required fixed charge, divided by the people who will actually use it.
So does it apply to you? Count the people who will log in. Below the stated minimum, the advertised price is wrong by the minimum divided by your count — 2.5 times for two people on a five-user minimum. At or above it, only a required fixed charge is left: NordLayer's $40.00 is $20.00 a head at two people, $4.00 at ten, $2.00 at twenty, $0.80 at fifty. Below twenty users, check all four fields before comparing anything. The teams of 2 to 4 page does this arithmetic for every vendor at that size.
Who this is not for
If you are buying twenty seats or more, this argument fades fast, and by fifty it is nearly irrelevant: the advertised price lands within a fifth of what you pay at twenty and within a tenth at fifty. At that size the useful pages are the full vendor list and what is not in the price, which covers the charges that do not scale down with headcount.
It is also not for anyone choosing based on security architecture, device coverage or throughput. This site compares published prices. It does not test these products and it does not know whether any of them is any good.
Questions people ask
Do the vendors with a minimum end up cheaper anyway at ten users? Sometimes. NordLayer Core at ten users is $15.00 per user, more than Twingate Business at $8.50 on annual billing and less than Tailscale Premium at $18.00 on monthly. The ordering changes with size, which is the point of the size pages and the calculator.
Is a dedicated IP worth the fixed charge? That is a question about your network, not your budget, and this site does not answer it. What it will tell you is what the charge does to your per-user figure, the part vendors' own tables leave out.
Why not just rank by the advertised price? Because for the smallest buyers that ranking is wrong by up to a factor of eleven here. On the card, NordLayer Core at $11.00 is under three times Twingate Teams at $4.25. On a two-person bill it is $47.50 against $4.25 annual, or $5.00 monthly.
What to do next
Put your real headcount into the calculator and compare on the computed column, annual against annual. The advertised price answers a different question from the one you are asking.
Sources
- NordLayer pricing — per-user prices, five-user minimum, $40.00 dedicated-IP server charge. Checked 2026-08-21.
- GoodAccess pricing — per-user prices, five-user minimum, $49.00 gateway marked optional. Checked 2026-08-21.
- uTunnel pricing — per-user prices and five-user minimum. Checked 2026-08-21.
- Twingate pricing — annual and monthly per-user prices. Checked 2026-08-21.
- Firezone pricing — Team plan per-user price, annual and monthly. Checked 2026-08-21.
- Tailscale pricing — Standard and Premium per-user prices. Checked 2026-08-21.
- ZeroTier pricing — Scale base plan charge, included devices, per-device rate. Checked 2026-08-21.
- Counts and computed figures come from data.json, which carries a source URL and check date on every row.
Written by Kaz (pen name). Figures are copied from providers' published pricing pages on the dates shown. We have not used these products. Corrections: contact form.