Firstbase Pricing: Plans, Costs & Hidden Fees in 2026

Firstbase pricing does not appear anywhere on the vendor's website. You complete a form, wait for a call, and only then learn what a year costs. Procurement is left guessing at a budget line before the first conversation happens.  

This guide puts every published number in one place: the verified buyer report, the split between platform and services, the costs that surface after signature, and what reviewers say the money buys. Each figure carries its source.

Two Companies Answer to the Name Firstbase

Two unrelated businesses use this name, and search engines mix them freely.

This page covers the equipment platform, which AppDirect bought in December 2024. The incorporation company registers US businesses and handles their paperwork; its two published prices were read on its own pricing page in July 2026. If a registered agent or a mailroom is what you came for, the second row of the table answers you. Everything below concerns the platform that manages laptops for globally distributed teams.

How Much Does Firstbase Cost?

Firstbase costs whatever your sales rep quotes, and the only public anchor is a buyer report. PriceLevel collects contract terms from verified purchasers, and its Firstbase entry describes a US company of 501 to 1,000 employees that signed in the third quarter of 2023.

PriceLevel names $170,000 as its median for the vendor and lists the four levers that buyer used: switching from a competitor, paying upfront, allowing logo use, and committing to services volume. Read the buyer report before your own call, because those levers are yours to trade on too.

The spread runs wide in both directions. An IT manager at a larger company wrote on Reddit that Firstbase wanted $500k for platform access alone, before any shipping or packaging. Below a certain size the answer stops being a price: one company was declined because its device footprint was too small to serve. Small device counts act as a gate here, never as a cheaper tier.

Tequipy: An Alternative

We build Tequipy, so read this section as an interested party talking and check the links. The structural difference sits at the start: there is nothing to subscribe to before the first order.

• Hardware at recommended retail price or lower, delivery included, bought locally across 180+ countries.

• A flat $99 monthly platform fee whatever the fleet size, and nothing to pay below 100 devices, per the pricing page.

• Lifecycle services charged per use, so a quiet quarter costs almost nothing.

• No contract, no minimum, no setup fee, and onboarding finished inside 24 hours.

Published results back the model. TapTap Send records 40+ hours and $6,500 a month saved with full device recovery, Booksy records 99% of devices arriving before start dates, and Gigs avoided an IT logistics hire worth $60,000 to $80,000 a year.

The work behind those line items runs from zero touch deployment at the start of a device life to laptop retrieval at the end. Customer results sit on the case studies page.

{{cta-primary}}

Firstbase Pricing Plans: A Breakdown

Firstbase sells one commercial shape with three stacked parts, plus a fourth variable that decides what each part is worth in your countries. Ask for all four as separate lines on the quote.

Platform Subscription

The subscription buys the software layer: onboarding triggered from your HR system, asset records, and the catalog employees order from. Price steps by headcount bracket rather than per seat. An enterprise reviewer on G2 asked the vendor to change that, saying he would rather pay per seat than by tiers of hundreds of active users.

The verified buyer paid $45,000 a year for a bracket covering up to 1,000 employees. That sum is the floor of your annual cost before a single laptop ships, which is why it lands hardest on companies carrying few devices per head.

Prepaid Services Commitment

The second part is the services pot, paid up front for the year. Deployments, retrievals, storage and wiping all draw against it. The buyer report puts that pot at $125,000 a year, nearly three times the platform fee.

A Firstbase customer of three years and more told us the platform fee felt ridiculous on its own, and that every device action still carried a charge on top of it. The question that decides your real annual cost is what happens to the share of the pot you never spend. Get that answer in writing.

Hardware: Buy, Lease or Bring Your Own

Firstbase offers three routes for the devices: outright purchase, a hardware as a service lease on 24 to 36 month terms, and equipment you already own that it stores and ships for you. No rate card is public and no source in this research names a percentage over retail, so the honest answer to the markup question is that nobody outside the company knows it.

One IT manager in Canada wrote on G2 that price "can be a little high for hardware and shipping in some countries", even after currency conversion. That is one market and one account, which makes it a question for your quote call.

What the Same Fee Buys in Different Countries

The subscription is one price and the service behind it is two products. Firstbase's own support documentation splits the network into company owned warehouses in the US, the UK, the EU and Canada, and partner run coverage everywhere else.

In the partner regions the platform will not accept equipment you already own, returns cover laptops and docks only, imaging is zero touch only, and hold policies are not offered. Certificates of destruction are unavailable in five Latin American warehouses. If most of your headcount sits there, the same annual fee buys a thinner service.

Firstbase Hidden Costs

The quote covers the fees. These five costs land afterwards.

• Prepaid services you never consume. The $125,000 pot is committed at signature. Nothing in the public buyer report says an unused balance rolls forward or comes back as cash.

• Bracket jumps as you hire. Because the fee steps by headcount band, one strong hiring quarter can push you into the next band mid contract. Ask where your band ends and what the following one costs.

• Signature and implementation fees. A prospect who priced the vendor told us the entry ran $80,000 to sign plus roughly $100,000 in prepaid action plans. That figure comes from a Tequipy sales conversation and describes one company's quote, never a published rate.

• Local buying in unsupported countries. A mid market IT administrator wrote on G2 that missing countries forced her team to make local purchases, or to ask new hires to arrange their own equipment. None of that effort appears on an invoice.

• Invoice checking as a standing job. One long Reddit account describes leased equipment invoices arriving late and full of errors, with the writer saving £10,000 by reconciling charges line by line. It is a single older account, so treat it as a reason to audit.

Pro tip: price the quote against your own last twelve months, not against a headcount band. Export every device event from the past year into one sheet: new starter shipments, leaver collections, storage months, repairs, and the country for each. Send that sheet to every vendor on your shortlist and ask what servicing exactly this list would cost. A committed annual model and a per use model can differ by a factor of five on identical volume, and the exercise takes an afternoon.

Firstbase Pros and Cons

The review base agrees on what works and what does not. You are paying a premium for service quality in four regions, and for coverage that thins out beyond them.

Pros

• Support people who behave like colleagues. Around 32 of the reviews we counted across G2 and Capterra praise account management by name, making it the most repeated theme in the set.

• Headcount genuinely saved. A senior IT specialist told G2 it saves the equivalent of one full time employee every year, and an IT engineering manager reported that it replaces the manual work of at least two people.

• Dependable warehouse work in the core markets. Retrieval kits, on time arrival and secure storage draw steady praise inside the US, UK, EU and Canada network.

• A product that keeps moving. Reviewers credit frequent releases and a team that acts on requests.

• Scores that hold up. The G2 profile sits at 4.8 out of 5 from 50 reviews and the Capterra listing at 4.5 from 10, both read in July 2026. One Capterra entry belongs to the incorporation company, so read that count as nine.

Cons

• Coverage gaps beyond the core four regions. Roughly 15 separate complaints across reviews, sales calls and Reddit name APAC, LATAM, MEA and smaller European markets. One reviewer asks plainly for more LATAM countries.

• Total cost, raised again and again. A Reddit commenter who tried the field over three years suggests smaller teams stitch together cheaper suppliers instead, which is the opposite of a single platform pitch.

• Shipping times that vary by region. Seven reviews plus G2's own generated summary describe inconsistent delivery. One reviewer calls the times a problem when onboarding has to move quickly.

• Integration depth. Reviewers want broader API coverage and official ITSM connectors. One customer built his own automation on the API after an HR system limitation surfaced late.

• Reporting and inventory visibility. Audit logging, per warehouse stock views and lifecycle reporting all draw requests for improvement.

• Device condition on redeployment. A December 2025 reviewer reports previously used laptops reaching the next employee without being cleaned.

Who Is Firstbase Best For?

Three profiles get real value from this contract shape. Everyone else pays for capacity they will not use.

The US and Western Europe Fleet Owner

A company whose people concentrate in the US, the UK, the EU or Canada buys the strong half of the network: company owned warehouses, full returns processing, custom imaging and hold policies. When nine in ten of your staff work there, the annual commitment maps onto real volume.

The Finance Team That Wants Devices Off the Balance Sheet

Firstbase runs a leasing product on 24 to 36 month terms across its core markets, a real advantage over suppliers that sell devices outright. A finance function that needs laptops treated as an operating expense has a short list, and this vendor belongs on it.

The Existing AppDirect Customer

Companies already buying software or telecom through AppDirect advisors can fold device lifecycle into the same commercial relationship. That consolidation carries value of its own, separate from any feature comparison.

Who it does not suit: companies with small or seasonal device volumes. The reported entry commitments and the refusal over footprint size point the same way, and neither is a tier you can negotiate into.

Firstbase Customer Reviews

Sentiment splits along two lines: where your people are, and how much you were willing to commit.

Positives

Support dominates the praise. A service desk lead calls the team knowledgeable, kind and persistent about finding solutions. Time saved comes second: one senior service desk specialist told G2 his workload dropped by 30 to 40% and that he no longer chases laptop tickets. Administrators like the platform itself, with one business administrator calling setup quick and the account structure easy to navigate. Offboarding earns its own compliments on Capterra, where reviewers describe custom boxes, prepaid labels and reminder emails sent to the leaver.

Complaints

The complaints group into three buckets. On coverage, a security director says the vendor has no presence in every country where his offshore contractors work, and another customer says its international reach is narrower than that of larger competitors.

On cost, an enterprise hospitality user says pricing becomes a challenge once the business operates globally, while a small business reviewer simply calls it pricy. On speed, one reviewer notes that expedited shipping is missing from some locations. An engineering manager adds the sharpest point: the reseller network still meets the same shortages an in house team would.

Alternative to Firstbase: Tequipy

Tequipy does the same lifecycle work on a different commercial shape. Nothing is committed in advance, hardware is bought at its local retail price, and each service is charged when a device moves. For globally distributed teams the practical effect is that spend follows hiring instead of preceding it.

Local buying in 180+ countries. Each device is sourced in the country where the employee lives, through one of 600+ authorised resellers, so no parcel crosses a border and no import charge arrives later. Delivery averages three business days and is capped at ten. Russia, Belarus and North Korea are the only excluded markets; every other one runs through the same global procurement network.

One registry for the whole device life. Buying, pre-configuration, repair, offboarding, storage, redeployment and sellback all run from a single asset registry, and the services work on devices you bought elsewhere. Existing fleets upload by CSV, so month one needs no migration project.

Published results back the model. TapTap Send records 40+ hours and $6,500 a month saved with full device recovery, Booksy records 99% of devices arriving before start dates, and Gigs avoided an IT logistics hire worth $60,000 to $80,000 a year.

Leasing is not on the menu here. Tequipy sells outright at retail and does not finance or rent devices anywhere, so a company that must book laptops as an operating expense belongs with a leasing supplier. Cross border shipping runs inside the EEA only, and Tequipy holds ISO 27001 with SOC 2 in progress rather than in hand.

{{cta-primary}}

How Much Does Firstbase Actually Cost per Month?

About $14,200 a month, if you divide the one verified buyer report by twelve. That $170,000 year covers a $45,000 platform subscription and a $125,000 prepaid services pot. Firstbase bills annually, so the monthly figure is arithmetic rather than an invoice.

Does Firstbase Publish Pricing on Their Website?

No. The pricing page is a short form asking for company details, with a promise of a customised quote. Every number in this article comes from buyer reports, review sites and sales conversations rather than from the vendor.

Is There a Minimum Seat Count for Firstbase?

No published minimum exists, though a practical floor does. One company reported being turned down because its device footprint was too small, and reported entry commitments run into six figures. Treat low device volume as a gate rather than a cheaper tier.

Does Firstbase Charge a Markup on Hardware?

Unknown. No public rate card exists and no source in this research names a percentage over retail. One Canadian reviewer reports hardware and shipping prices running high in his market, which is reason enough to ask for a device by device quote and compare it against local retail.

Can You Negotiate Firstbase Pricing?

Yes. The one verified buyer cut a $220,000 list price to $170,000, a 21% discount, using four levers: switching from a competitor, paying upfront, agreeing to marketing and logo use, and committing to services volume. Decide which you can offer before the first quote arrives, and read the Tequipy homepage for a posted price to negotiate against.