Cognito Forms publishes four plans, and the headline figures are the least interesting part of them. What decides whether a plan fits is the combination of three separate meters: entries per month, users, and a second class of person called a guest. Two of those three are easy to miscount when signing up, and one of them resets every month whether the work does or not.
The figures below are taken from the published pricing page in September 2026, in US dollars, with sales tax noted as applicable in some jurisdictions.
The four plans as published
| Plan | Monthly | Billed annually | Entries per month | Users | Guests |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Individual | Free | Free | 100 | 1 | None listed |
| Pro | 24 USD | 19 USD | 2,000 | 2 | None listed |
| Team | 49 USD | 39 USD | 10,000 | 5 | 5 |
| Enterprise | 174 USD | 129 USD | Unlimited | 20 | 20 |
Two things are constant across all four. Forms are unlimited on every plan, and so are payments. That removes an annoyance common elsewhere, where old forms get deleted or archived to make room under a form count, and it means the number of forms is simply not a thing to plan around here.
The free plan is described as always free with no credit card required, and it carries Cognito Forms branding on the form. Removing that branding is a Pro feature.
What an entry is, and why the period matters more than the number
An entry is a submission, and the allowance is counted per month. That is the meter to think hardest about, because a monthly meter tracks demand rather than effort. The month a job advert goes out, a registration opens or a product launches is the month the number spikes, and it is exactly the month when running out is most expensive.
The useful exercise is not to estimate an average. Take the busiest month of the last year and use that. One hundred entries a month, the free allowance, covers a quiet contact form and very little else: a single open recruitment round or one popular event can pass it in a week. Two thousand a month on Pro is a genuinely large allowance for most small teams. Ten thousand on Team is beyond what most organisations of that size generate, and by the time the number is realistic the seat count has usually decided the plan anyway.
Unlimited entries arrive only on Enterprise, alongside the security features, so a team with very high volume and no need for compliance controls is paying for the controls to get the volume.
Users and guests are not the same thing
Users are the people who build and manage forms. Pro allows two, Team allows five, Enterprise allows twenty.
Guests appear from the Team plan onwards, five on Team and twenty on Enterprise. A guest is a lighter form of access, which is the mechanism for involving people outside the core team without buying each of them a full seat. The distinction matters when counting heads, because the answer to "how many people need access" usually splits into two very different groups: the two or three who build and administer, and the several who need to look at entries or approve something occasionally.
Count those groups separately before comparing plans. A team of six where two build and four occasionally approve is a Team plan. The same six where all of them build is not.
There is also a detail in the billing notes worth carrying into the decision: on an annual plan, additional usage during the term, including guests, storage and API usage, is covered through what the company calls a usage wallet. So guests are not a hard ceiling on an annual plan so much as a bundled allowance with a top up mechanism behind it.
What each step up actually buys
Read the plans as three jumps rather than four prices and the ladder becomes clear.
Free to Pro buys the professional finish and the ability to share the work with one other person. Electronic signatures, save and resume for respondents, removal of the Cognito Forms branding, two users, and twenty times the entry allowance. Save and resume is the quiet one on that list. For any form long enough that someone will not finish it in a single sitting, an application or a grant submission, its absence is what turns a half completed form into a lost applicant.
Pro to Team buys the workflow layer. A client portal, workflow and approvals, data lookups, five users and five guests. This is the point where the product stops being about collecting and starts being about processing, and it is worth noticing where that sits on the ladder: approvals are on the third plan of four. Any team whose actual problem is "the form is fine but nobody knows who is handling each submission" is looking at the Team plan, not the entry level paid one.
Team to Enterprise buys compliance and control. HIPAA compliance, folder permissions, single sign on, unlimited entries, twenty users and twenty guests. The price step here is the largest of the three, and the features are largely the ones asked for by an IT or compliance function rather than by the people running the forms. If none of those three words appear in your requirements, this plan is unlikely to be the answer regardless of volume.
The three questions that place a team on this ladder
Rather than reading the feature lists in full, three questions sort most teams onto a plan in about a minute.
Will anyone abandon a form halfway through and need to come back to it. If yes, save and resume is required, and that starts at Pro. Long applications, grant submissions and anything asking for documents fall into this group, and the cost of not having it is measured in lost applicants rather than in money.
Does a submission have to be approved by someone before anything happens next. If yes, the workflow and approvals layer starts at Team, and building the same thing by hand out of email threads costs more in a month than the plan difference does in a year.
Does the data include health information, or does the IT function require single sign on. If yes, the answer is Enterprise regardless of volume, because HIPAA compliance, folder permissions and single sign on are all on that plan and nowhere below it.
A no to all three usually means Pro is sufficient, and the entry allowance of 2,000 a month is the reason it stays sufficient for longer than people expect.
The billing rules that change the real cost
Several details on the pricing page matter more than the monthly figure.
Annual billing is materially cheaper and is stated as such. The published annual rates are 19, 39 and 129 against monthly rates of 24, 49 and 174. Anyone certain of using the tool for a year is choosing between those two columns, not between plans.
Plan changes are allowed at any time, with rules attached. Upgrades take effect immediately and the price difference is prorated against the remaining billing period. A downgrade on a monthly plan takes effect at the next billing date. On an annual plan a downgrade can be scheduled to take effect at renewal. That asymmetry is normal, and it means the safe direction to guess is downwards: start lower and upgrade the moment the meter bites, rather than buying headroom in advance.
The free trial ends by dropping, not by charging. A 14 day trial can be started without payment, and when it ends the organisation moves automatically to the free Individual plan unless billing information has been supplied. That is friendlier than an automatic charge, and it also means a form quietly inherits the 100 entry monthly allowance at the end of a trial if nobody was watching.
Each organisation is billed separately. One user account can create any number of organisations, and each one is treated as a stand alone entity with its own plan. For an agency running forms for several clients, or a company where two departments each want their own space, that is the detail that turns one subscription into three. Check it before designing the structure.
Non profit discounts exist and are not automatic. Discounted rates are offered at any plan level for tax exempt organisations under section 501(c)(3), excluding educational and governmental bodies, and the route is to contact support and apply.
Reading the plans against your own situation
Three numbers settle it, in this order.
Start with entries in the busiest month, not the average month, and add a margin. If that number is above 100, the free plan is a trial rather than a plan. If it is comfortably under 2,000, volume will not be what decides between Pro and Team.
Then split the head count into builders and occasional participants. Builders consume users, occasional participants consume guests, and guests only exist from the Team plan. Two builders is the Pro ceiling, so a third person who needs to build at all moves the plan by itself.
Then name the one capability the work depends on. Save and resume, electronic signatures, approvals, single sign on, HIPAA. Each of those sits on a specific plan, and a single hard requirement overrides all the volume arithmetic above it.
If entries and people point at different plans, respect the people count. Volume can be managed by upgrading mid month when it bites, since upgrades are immediate and prorated. A missing seat blocks work today.
Where per submission pricing and per person pricing part ways
Worth stepping back to notice the shape of the decision, because it is the same decision across this whole category. Some tools meter what arrives, and some meter who is working.
A monthly entry allowance is predictable when demand is predictable, and it puts a ceiling exactly where a successful campaign lands. Seat based pricing is predictable when the team is stable, and it puts the cost on collaboration instead. Neither is wrong. They suit different shapes of work, and the test is which number in your organisation moves the most from month to month.
A form tool priced only by the number of people using it, with unlimited forms and unlimited responses, makes the opposite trade: the busy month costs nothing extra, and adding a colleague is the thing with a price. For teams whose real difficulty starts after the submission, where each entry needs an owner, a status and a reply, that tends to be the meter that matches the work. The comparison worth reading closely is what each tool does once the response has arrived, and the way the plans are drawn when responses are not the meter is easy to check against the numbers above.
What to check first
Find the entry count for your busiest month and the number of people who genuinely need to build rather than just look. Those two numbers pick the plan on their own, and the feature list only intervenes if something like signatures or approvals is a hard requirement. If the entries are one to one and the work that hurts is the replying rather than the collecting, it is worth seeing what a response management screen looks like before committing to a year.
Q1. What counts as an entry on Cognito Forms?
An entry is a submission, and the allowance is counted per month rather than per year or per form. Forms themselves are unlimited on every plan, including the free one, so there is no reason to delete old forms. The free plan allows 100 entries a month, Pro 2,000, Team 10,000, and Enterprise is listed as unlimited.
Q2. Is annual billing meaningfully cheaper?
Yes. The published annual rates are 19, 39 and 129 US dollars per month against monthly rates of 24, 49 and 174. Annual plans also include a usage wallet that covers additional usage during the term, such as extra guests, storage or API calls, which monthly billing does not bundle in the same way.
Q3. What is the difference between a user and a guest?
Users build and manage forms. Guests are a lighter form of access for people outside the core team, and they appear from the Team plan onwards, five on Team and twenty on Enterprise. Counting builders and occasional participants separately is the fastest way to work out which plan the head count requires.
Q4. What happens when a free trial ends?
The organisation moves automatically to the free Individual plan unless billing information has been provided, so nothing is charged without consent. The practical consequence is that the entry allowance drops to 100 a month at that point, which is worth knowing if a live form is still collecting when the trial expires.
Q5. Does one subscription cover several departments or clients?
No. A single user account can create any number of organisations, but each organisation is a stand alone billing entity and needs its own plan to reach paid features. Anyone planning separate spaces per client or per department should price that as several subscriptions rather than one.