Key takeaways
  • Headcount is the wrong starting number. The right one is how many people need to see across the work rather than complete one piece of it.
  • For a 200-person site that is typically eight to fifteen people: supervisors, quality, maintenance, EHS and a plant manager.
  • Everyone else completes tasks from a link and is not counted, so the licence question stops scaling with the workforce.
The count that matters
Who needs a dashboard, not who does the work

A dashboard is for someone who must know the state of many things. A link is for someone who must do one thing. Confusing the two is what makes frontline software look unaffordable.

Work it out in four questions

  • Who needs to see across shifts or lines? Usually shift supervisors and the plant manager.
  • Who investigates and closes findings? Quality, maintenance and EHS leads.
  • Who edits processes? Whoever owns the SOPs, often one or two people.
  • Who reports to the business? One person, sometimes the same as above.

Add those up. On a 200-person site the honest total is rarely above fifteen, and often under ten. That is your licence count.

A worked example

A plant running three shifts with 180 operators, 12 maintenance technicians and 8 staff across quality and EHS. Four shift supervisors, a plant manager, two quality leads, a maintenance planner and an EHS officer need to log in. That is nine people, which fits a Starter or Growth plan depending on how much room you want.

The remaining 191 people receive their checks by link, complete them on their phones, and never appear on the bill.

Why this changes the rollout

When licences scale with headcount, the pilot succeeds and the rollout stalls, because covering the whole site costs more than the problem. When they scale with the number of managers, the second site costs roughly what the first did, and the decision to expand stops being financial.

RakuOps pricing, concretely

Free covers up to 5 people who log in. Starter is $99 a month for up to 10, Growth is $299 for up to 50, and Pro is $599 with no limit. Every plan has every feature; the only variable is how many people log in. Everyone completing tasks is free and unlimited.