Where both prices are printed, monthly business VPN pricing runs 18% to 29% higher
Four of the 24 business VPN vendors here publish both a yearly price and a month-to-month price. On those plans, paying by the month costs 18% to 29% more per user.
Eleven of the 24 print a per-user figure of some kind; the other 13 do not, either because they publish no price we could read or because what they publish is not priced per person. Seven of the eleven print a single number, and the page does not always say which term that number is for.
A per-user price is not one number. It is a number attached to a billing term, and the same plan usually carries two of them. Almost every comparison table, including the headline column on a vendor's own page, shows one.
The plans where both prices are printed
| Plan | Annual, per user | Month to month, per user | Monthly is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Twingate Teams | $4.25 | $5.00 | 18% more |
| Twingate Business | $8.50 | $10.00 | 18% more |
| Firezone Team | $4.16 | $5.00 | 20% more |
| GoodAccess Premium | $11.00 | $14.00 | 27% more |
| GoodAccess Essential | $7.00 | $9.00 | 29% more |
Five plans, three vendors. That is the whole of what can be compared directly in this dataset, and it is a small enough number that the range above should be read as a range, not as a market rate.
PureVPN Business is the fourth vendor, and it prints its two prices as two separate rows rather than two columns: Starter at $9.00 per user month to month, and Starter at $7.00 per user on annual billing, both for the one-to-ten seat tier. That is 29% more for the monthly row, on the same reading.
The other seven publish one number, and 17 of 23 plans carry only a monthly one
Of the 24 vendors here, 13 publish a price we could read, and 11 of those publish it as a per-user figure. VyprVPN Business prices a five-user bundle and Pritunl prices per server, so neither has a per-user number to split by term. Four of the 11 print both terms. The remaining seven print one figure, and for 17 of the 23 priced plans in this dataset we hold a month-to-month figure and no annual one.
The dataset holds two named cases of what that looks like. NordLayer's page states annual savings of about 20% on Lite, 21% on Core and 22% on Premium, and prints no annual per-user figure we could read: the discount is published and the price it applies to is not. OpenVPN CloudConnexa is the other kind — an annual figure was on the page, but what we retrieved was inconsistent enough that we did not record it. Both are ranked here on their monthly number, which makes them look more expensive on this site than they would be for an annual buyer, and per_user_annual sits in the unconfirmed list on both rows.
That is a statement about our reading, not about the vendors. A single published figure can mean the vendor sells on one term only, or that the page shows the annual rate and says so in small type, or that we read the monthly toggle and not the yearly one. Where we could not settle it, the plan carries the figure we could source and nothing more. The method page sets out how each field is filled and what is left null.
What the discount is buying, and when it stops paying
The 18% to 29% gap is not a fee for paying monthly. It is the price of a twelve-month commitment, and both sides get something from it. The vendor gets a year of revenue it can count. You get a lower rate and lose the ability to leave in month three.
That trade has a break-even, and it is computable from the published figures. Twingate Teams is $5.00 a month against $51 a year, which breaks even at ten months. GoodAccess Essential is $9.00 a month against $84 a year, which breaks even at nine. Across all five plans in the table above the crossover sits between nine and ten months.
So the test is tenure, not headcount. If you can name a plausible reason you might not be running this product nine months from now, the monthly rate is the cheaper bet. If you cannot, the annual rate is simply cheaper and the option you are buying is one you will never use.
One caveat, and it is a large one: only PureVPN states the contract length on its page. contract_months is null on the Twingate, Firezone and GoodAccess rows, so how long a commitment those annual rates actually buy is unconfirmed here.
Where the term meets the minimum
The billing term is the third of the three things that move a published per-user price, and it interacts with the first two.
At two users the five-user minimum is doing far more damage than the billing term: $17.50 against a $7.00 sticker. The term adds $5.00 per user on top of that. At ten users the minimum has stopped biting and the term is the only thing left, worth $240 over a year.
The required fixed charge is missing from this page because no per-user plan lets us show it. Four of the 23 priced plans carry a required one — NordLayer Core and Premium, ZeroTier Essential and Scale — and not one of them publishes an annual per-user figure, so on a per-user price the term and the fixed charge never move together here. GoodAccess's $49 dedicated gateway is an optional add-on, which is why it is left out of the arithmetic above.
The one plan where all three do move together prices nothing per user. VyprVPN Business Professional Edition is a required base fee covering five users, and it prints both terms: $55.00 a month, or $329.99 a year, which is $27.50 a month. The monthly term costs 100% more than the yearly one, against 18% to 29% on every per-user plan in the table above. Because no per-seat rate is published for users beyond the included five, that gap cannot be put in a per-user column at all. Per user, per device, or per server covers what a bundle price does to a comparison.
The ranking on this site is computed on the annual figure where a vendor publishes one, because that is the lower of the two and every number here is meant to be a floor. What is not in the published price covers the rest of the floor, and small teams pay the most per person covers the minimum. The calculator will re-rank at your own team size.
One page's discount line does not match its own prices
PureVPN's business page states a 13% discount for annual billing. The two figures we recorded from that page on 2026-08-21, $9.00 monthly and $7.00 annual at the one-to-ten seat tier, are 22% apart measured the way the vendor's own sentence measures it — as a discount off the monthly price. That is the same pair as the 29% quoted earlier, which reads the gap the other way, up from the annual price. At the 501-seat tier the same page shows $4.00 and $3.00, a 25% discount on the vendor's own basis.
We are reporting what we read on one day, and a stale line on a marketing page is the likeliest explanation. It is worth knowing anyway: the sentence that describes a discount and the table that prices it are maintained by different people, and only one of them is the offer.
Who this is not for
If you have already agreed to a contract, none of this applies to you; your term and your rate are whatever you signed. This page is for buyers reading a pricing page, where the toggle at the top of the table is usually set to the annual view and the number under it is the one that ends up in the spreadsheet.
It is also not a recommendation to pick either term. We have not used any of these products, we hold no view on which of them is worth buying, and the only thing we are claiming is what each vendor printed.
Questions people ask
Is the annual price billed once a year or monthly at the lower rate? It varies, and most of these pages do not say. Where a vendor states it we record it; where it does not, the field is null and the plan carries no claim either way.
Do the vendors that publish nothing discount for annual billing? Seven of the 24 here ask you to contact sales and publish no price at all, so there is nothing to compare. Four more — Perimeter 81, Proton VPN Business, Surfshark Business and ExpressVPN Teams — do publish figures, and we could not read them. That is our limitation, not theirs, and it is not evidence either way about how they bill. The vendors that publish nothing keeps the two groups apart.
Why does the ranking use the annual price where there is one? Because it is the lower of the two, and every number on this site is meant to be a floor the invoice can only exceed. Six of the 23 priced plans carry an annual figure: the five in the table above, plus Tailscale's free Personal plan, where both figures are $0 and the term makes no difference. The other 17 are ranked on the only figure they publish.
Sources
- Twingate,
https://www.twingate.com/pricing; Firezone,https://www.firezone.dev/pricing; GoodAccess,https://www.goodaccess.com/pricing; PureVPN Business,https://www.purevpn.com/business-vpn; NordLayer,https://nordlayer.com/pricing/; OpenVPN CloudConnexa,https://openvpn.net/pricing/. All checked 2026-08-21. - Every figure above comes from data.json, where each row carries its own source URL and check date, and every computed figure follows the formula on the method page. The whole list is on the vendor page.
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.