Every legal AI product we looked at while building Doclayer charges per user per month. Some publish the number; most make you ask. Buyers on public forums describe quotes in the hundreds per user before negotiation, sometimes with minimum seat counts. We decided early that Doclayer would not do this, and I want to set out why, along with the parts of the decision I am still not sure about.
Who reads a review
Watch a diligence review for a week and count the people who touch it. Two or three do the work: they write the questions, run the review, open the citations, make the calls. Then there is everyone else. The deal lead who reads the issues list on Thursday. The partner who opens one cell to check a liability cap. The client who wants to see the evidence behind a finding. The associate on another matter who needs the governing-law column for a precedent.
Seat pricing charges all of them the same. So the firm buys three seats, and the other eight people get a PDF export by email, and the review stops being a shared record and turns back into a document that goes stale the day it is sent. The tool has priced out exactly the people whose reading of the review justifies doing it at all.
What we charge for instead
A Doclayer plan covers one monday account. Everyone authorized on that account can open the review table, read the evidence, and, if they are a member rather than a viewer, run and publish. The thing you pay for is Review Units: one unit is one Document put through one review of up to fifteen Questions. Forty contracts is forty units. Rerun ten of them after the signed versions arrive and that is ten more.
This lines the price up with the work. A quiet month costs little. A live deal costs more, and the Deal plan exists for exactly that month. Adding a reader costs nothing, which is the outcome we wanted: the more people who read the review, the better the review was worth doing.
Why the price is public
Partly principle, partly practicality. A deal team evaluating tools in the middle of a transaction does not have time for a sales cycle, and a price they can read is a price they can put in front of the partner the same afternoon. It also keeps us honest. A public number cannot be quietly different for the customer who negotiates less well. The plans are on the pricing page, and the trial is ten Documents free with no card.
What we are not sure about
Two things. First, the unit. "One Document through one review" is easy to explain, but it means a two-page NDA and a two-hundred-page lease cost the same unit, up to the plan's page limit. We chose simplicity over precision. If most customers end up reviewing long documents, that choice will need revisiting.
Second, reruns. Charging again when a Document is rerun is consistent, because the processing happens again, but it can feel like paying twice for the same contract. We soften it with rollover, so unused units carry forward up to twice the monthly allowance, and with pooled annual plans. Whether that is enough is something the first year of customers will tell us, not something we can reason our way to now.
What this is not
It is not a claim that Doclayer is cheaper than the platforms. They do more, and a firm that needs drafting and research alongside review is buying a different thing. The comparison pages on this site say where each of them is stronger. What per-document pricing buys you is a cost that tracks the review and a table the whole team can open. For the teams we built this for, that is the trade that matters.