Pricing
Pay for the people you actually ask
Team is billed per contributor, and you choose who that is — scope Cairn to one team as a pilot and grow from there. Above 50 employees it moves to an account plan with agreed limits.
Team
Most teams1–49 employees
Everything Cairn does, for a company small enough that one cohort covers it. Set up in a week, with us doing the configuration alongside you.
- Priced per contributor — you choose which teams take part
- Slack, email, and web capture, with the full question bank
- Automatic conflict detection and reconciliation
- Tool registry, quarterly attestation, and savings reporting
- Cairn MCP server and REST API, with scoped tokens
- White-glove onboarding — we configure it with you, not for you to figure out
Custom
50+ employees
An account plan with agreed limits rather than a per-contributor count, for organisations with multiple groups, stricter access rules, or a procurement process that needs more than a card.
- Everything in Team, on an account plan rather than per contributor
- Nested groups and per-group administration
- Knowledge visibility restricted by group, team, or role
- SSO (SAML/OIDC) and SCIM provisioning
- Configurable data retention policies with enforcement
- Audit log export and adoption reporting
True on every plan
- You decide which teams take part — scope it to a pilot and grow from there
- Contributors always control and can correct their own statements
- Cairn MCP and the REST API are included, not an add-on
- GDPR data export and erasure on request
- Encryption in transit and at rest, on every plan
- No tier gates the security features — those are never an upsell
Pricing questions
The obvious ones
What exactly are we paying for?
On Team, you pay per contributor — the people who are actually asked questions. You choose who that is, so if only two teams are in scope you are not paying for the whole company. Above 50 employees it moves to an account plan with agreed limits, because counting heads stops being a useful unit at that size.
What actually changes at 50 employees?
The product is the same. What changes is the administration around it: multiple groups with their own admins, visibility restricted by group or role, SSO and SCIM instead of magic links alone, retention policies, and audit log export. Those are the things a larger organisation needs and a 20-person company does not.
Why is there no price on this page?
Because we do not have one we would stand behind yet. Cairn is onboarding its first cohorts and we are still learning which shapes of team get the most value, which is the thing that should determine pricing. Publishing a number now and changing it in three months would be worse than saying this plainly. Waitlist members get pricing before it is public, and early-cohort terms.
Is there a free trial?
Not in the usual sense. Cairn produces value as answers accumulate over weeks, so a 14-day self-serve trial would show you an empty product and teach you nothing. Early cohorts instead get a scoped pilot — usually one or two teams — with us configuring it alongside you.