Motion App Pricing per Seat and What the AI Credits Really Meter

Motion costs $19 or $29 per seat per month for a team on annual billing, $29 or $49 billed monthly, and the number that decides your real bill is not the seat price. It is the AI credit allowance. Pro AI includes 7,500 AI credits per seat each month. Business AI includes 15,000. Go past the allowance and you pay overage: 25 cents per 100 credits on Pro, 19 cents per 100 on Business. That metering is the part almost every comparison article leaves out, and it is the reason two teams on the same plan can get very different invoices.

Every figure below was read off usemotion.com/pricing, including the plan data behind its billing toggle. We sell an AI office assistant, so we compete with Motion in part of its range. Nothing here is arranged to make it look expensive, and where Motion is the better buy this article says so.

Motion pricing, both plans

The pricing page opens with "Pay annually (Save 33%)" already selected, which is the detail most write-ups miss: the $19 and $29 on the page are the annual rates, and paying month to month costs $29 and $49 per seat. That is a 34 percent gap on Pro AI and 41 percent on Business AI. Motion also prices a single user differently from a team. One person buying alone pays $29 a month annually or $49 monthly for Pro AI, and $39 or $69 for Business AI, so a solo seat costs about half as much again as the same seat inside a team.

What Business AI adds over Pro AI is team machinery rather than more of the same: capacity planning across a team, advanced dashboards, timeline and Gantt views, time tracking, permissions, central billing and priority support. If you are a team of one or two, the extra $10 a seat on annual billing, or $20 monthly, buys you almost nothing you will use.

How much does Motion cost per month for a team?

Run the arithmetic before you get attached to the seat price, because per-seat pricing compounds quietly. A five person team on Pro AI at $19 is $1,140 for the year on annual billing, or $145 a month and $1,740 a year paying monthly. The same five people on Business AI is $1,740 a year annually, or $245 a month and $2,940 a year monthly. A twenty person team on Business AI is $6,960 a year on annual billing and $11,760 paying month to month. The billing term moves the bill more than the plan choice does.

Then add the credits. This is where the estimate gets soft, and it is the honest limitation of any pricing article on this product, ours included. Motion does not publish a conversion between real work and credits, so nobody can tell you in advance how many of your 7,500 you will actually use. What we can tell you is the shape of the risk: heavy AI use costs extra on a plan that presents itself as flat, and the overage rate is meaningfully cheaper on the more expensive plan (19 cents against 25 cents per 100), which is Motion nudging heavy users upward.

The practical move is to run a month on Pro AI with real work in it, look at your credit consumption, and only then decide. If you are consistently burning through 7,500 credits a seat, Business AI is probably cheaper than Pro plus overage even before the team features.

Is Motion worth it?

It is worth it if your actual problem is that you have more tasks than hours and no reliable way to decide what to do next. Motion's real trick is auto-scheduling: it takes your task list, your deadlines and your existing calendar, and builds a day for you, then rebuilds it when a meeting lands on top of the block you had reserved. If you have ever spent Sunday evening re-planning a week that a Tuesday meeting destroyed, that is a genuine product.

It is not worth it if your problem is that work does not get finished. This is the distinction worth holding on to when you compare tools in this category. Motion is superb at deciding when you should do something. It does not do the thing. The follow-up email still needs writing by you, the contract still needs filing by you, the client who did not reply still needs chasing by you. Motion will make sure a slot exists on Thursday for all three.

It is also a poor fit for people whose calendars are mostly other people's meetings rather than their own deep work. An executive assistant coordinating three executives gets less from auto-scheduling than a solo consultant with a long backlog does, because the constraint is other humans rather than task ordering. If that is you, the more useful comparison is between dedicated calendar tools, which we lay out on executive assistant software.

Is Motion worth the money against the free alternatives?

Partly, and it depends on whether you would actually use the automation. Google Calendar and Outlook both do time blocking if you do it manually, and both are already paid for. What you are buying from Motion at $19 a seat is the automation of a decision you could make yourself: what to work on next, and when. People who genuinely dislike planning get a lot from that. People who already keep a decent list and a protected calendar often find after two months that they are paying for a rearrangement of something that was not broken.

The clearer comparison is against other paid tools in the same lane rather than against free calendars. Reclaim occupies similar ground with a different emphasis on habits and defending focus time, and we compare it directly on Reclaim alternative. The two planners you drive yourself are cheaper still on monthly billing: Akiflow at $19 a month yearly or $34 monthly (see Akiflow pricing and Akiflow vs Motion) and Sunsama at $17 or $22 (see Sunsama pricing). Our own take on where Motion is strong and where it stops is on Motion alternative.

What the credit model changes about buying software like this

Motion is one of a growing number of tools that moved from a flat seat price to a seat price plus a metered AI allowance, and it is worth understanding the pattern rather than just this one product's numbers, because you will meet it repeatedly over the next two years.

The flat seat price used to be the whole cost, which made budgeting trivial: seats times price times twelve. With a credit meter underneath, your bill now has a variable component that scales with how enthusiastically your team uses the feature you bought the product for. The incentive that creates is slightly perverse: the more successful the rollout, the higher the invoice, and the department that adopts the tool best gets the largest bill.

Two things protect you. First, check the overage rate as carefully as the seat rate, because that is the number that governs the surprise. Motion publishes both, which is more transparency than several of its competitors offer, and worth crediting. Second, watch what per-seat subscriptions total across the whole company rather than one line at a time, since this category of spend grows by accretion and nobody notices until renewal season. If nobody owns that number at your company, keeping every software subscription in one running total is the kind of thing that pays for itself the first time it catches a tool nobody uses any more.

Does Motion have a free plan?

No. Motion sells a free trial rather than a free tier, and its pricing page does not state the trial length, so check it at signup rather than trusting a number from a comparison article. That matters more than it sounds, because the products Motion competes with mostly do have real free tiers, and a buyer used to trying calendar tools indefinitely will find the door closes here. Plan to evaluate it properly inside the trial window with real work rather than a test project, since auto-scheduling only shows its value when the calendar is genuinely under pressure.

Who should buy Motion, and who should not

Buy it if you are a founder, consultant, agency lead or anyone with a large self-directed backlog and a calendar you control. The auto-scheduling earns its money fastest for people whose work is mostly their own to sequence, and the $19 seat is cheap against an hour a week of planning.

Buy Business AI instead of Pro AI only if you need the team layer: capacity planning across people, dashboards, Gantt views, time tracking and permissions. The extra credits matter too, but the team features are what the $10 is actually for.

Do not buy it if the honest description of your week is that things sit unfinished rather than unscheduled. That is a different product category, and no amount of intelligent calendar arrangement fixes it. OfficeAgent handles that side: it drafts the follow-ups, files the documents and prepares the meeting notes, and a human approves everything before it goes out. It is $149 a month for a solo operator and $399 for an office of up to ten, which is set out on our pricing page, and the loop is described on how OfficeAgent works.

Plenty of teams sensibly run both, and there is no conflict in that. Motion decides when the work happens. Something else has to do it.