Qase Pricing: Free Tier, Plans, and the True Cost

Three seats sounds generous until you count who actually needs to touch test cases on a real team. A QA lead, two backend engineers reviewing regression suites, and a PM who wants visibility into release status is already five people wanting a login, and Qase's free plan stops issuing new ones at three.

Most teams don't hit a feature wall on Qase's free tier. They hit a headcount wall. The plan gives you working test case management: suites, runs, defect logging, a usable UI, right up until the fourth person needs access. That's the moment the free plan question turns into a per-user pricing question, and the answer depends on which paid tier you land on next.

Qase pricing tiers

Qase's public pricing page lists four plans, and the naming is straightforward: Free, Startup, Business, and Enterprise. Here's how they break down.

Tier	Price	Limits	Best for
Free	$0	3 users, 2 projects, 500 MB storage	Solo testers, small pilots
Startup	$24/user/month	20 users, unlimited projects, 100 GB	Small teams past the free cap
Business	$30/user/month	100 users, unlimited storage, RBAC	Growing QA orgs, multiple teams
Enterprise	Custom quote	Unlimited users, SSO/SCIM	Large orgs, compliance needs

The per-user math moves fast as you add seats. A five-person team on Startup pays $120/month, or $1,440/year. Grow that team to fifteen people and you're at $360/month, or $4,320/year, on the same tier, just paying for more logins. Business adds role-based access control and a full year of test history, both of which matter once compliance or multi-team visibility becomes a requirement instead of a nice-to-have.

Qase also gates AI credits by tier: Startup includes 1,000 AI credits a month, Business raises that to 2,000, and Enterprise goes to 4,000. If your team leans on Qase's AI features for case generation or summarization, that's a plan limit worth checking before you commit, since credits reset monthly rather than rolling over. Paid tiers also show a discounted annual billing toggle on the pricing page, though Qase doesn't break out the exact per-user annual rate separately from the monthly figure shown above.

What the free plan includes (and where it stops)

The free tier isn't a stripped-down demo. It includes real test case management: unlimited test cases within your 2 projects, run tracking, defect logging, and Qase's core UI, backed by 500 MB of storage and 30 days of history retention. For a single QA engineer validating whether Qase fits their workflow, that's a genuinely usable plan, not a 14-day trial with a countdown clock.

Where it stops is specific and mechanical: 3 user seats, 2 projects, 500 MB of storage, 30-day history, and a 25,000-per-month cap on API results. None of those are soft warnings. Try to invite a fourth person and Qase asks you to upgrade. Try to spin up a third project for a new product line and you hit the same wall. The free plan doesn't degrade gracefully into a paid nudge, it just stops letting you add the thing you're trying to add.

That's a deliberate limit, not a bug, and it's worth planning around rather than discovering mid-project. If you know your team will cross 3 testers or 2 active projects within the first quarter, budgeting for Startup from day one avoids a mid-sprint scramble to add a fourth seat during a release crunch. And if the seat cap itself is the real blocker rather than price, our roundup of test case management tools with genuinely free plans looks at where Qase's 3-user ceiling sits next to alternatives that don't charge per seat at all.

Qase vs Testmo vs PractiTest on price

Qase isn't priced in isolation. Testmo and PractiTest sit in the same per-seat test case management category, and lining them up against Qase's numbers is the fastest way to tell whether $24 to $30 per user per month is competitive or expensive for what you're getting.

Testmo pricing bundles test case management with automation reporting and exploratory session tracking under one per-user price, and its plan structure trades Qase's flat seat tiers for a more granular seat-and-add-on model, so the two aren't a clean apples-to-apples comparison at every headcount. PractiTest leans further into requirements traceability and enterprise-grade reporting, positioning that typically pushes its effective per-seat cost above Qase's Startup and Business tiers once you need the full requirements traceability matrix feature set rather than basic case management.

For an exact, source-checked breakdown of PractiTest's current tiers, our PractiTest pricing guide goes deeper into how it prices against Qase seat-for-seat. If Zephyr is the other tool on your shortlist, our Zephyr pricing breakdown covers how its Marketplace-based per-seat model compares. If what actually bothers you is the per-seat model itself rather than the specific price, our look at open-source alternatives to Qase covers tools priced on a different axis entirely. And if you're still deciding which category of tool fits your team rather than which specific vendor, our test case management tools comparison is the better starting point.

How Autonoma Shrinks the Test Cases You Pay a Seat For

Every plan above prices the same underlying thing: seats attached to a growing library of hand-written test cases. Free caps that library at 3 people. Startup and Business raise the ceiling and add storage, history, and AI credits, but the core unit of cost never changes. You're paying per person, per month, to store and organize test cases that a human wrote, and someone still has to update those cases every time the UI changes underneath them.

That's the real ceiling on any per-user test case management tool, and no plan tier removes it. Upgrading from Startup to Business doesn't reduce the hours your team spends writing new cases or fixing broken ones after a release. It just raises how many people can log in to do that work. The authoring and maintenance time is the cost that doesn't show up on Qase's pricing page, and it scales with your product, not with your plan.

That's the gap we built Autonoma to close from the other direction. Instead of a human writing a test case for a seat-licensed tool to store, Autonoma's Planner agent reads your actual codebase, routes, components, user flows, and plans the test cases directly from that, including the database state each scenario needs. An Executor agent runs those tests against a live preview environment, and a Reviewer agent checks the results to separate a real bug from an agent error or a stale test. Then, on every pull request, a Diffs Agent re-reads the code changes and updates the suite: adding cases for new flows, deprecating ones that no longer apply, and adjusting the rest, so the backlog doesn't grow into something a person has to groom by hand.

That maintenance loop is the headline capability here, not a side feature. Most teams don't lose to per-seat pricing on day one. They lose to it eighteen months later, after cases have piled up for features that changed shape twice and nobody had time to go back and edit the old ones. The Planner agent is what generates that first batch of coverage from your codebase instead of a person's memory of how the app used to work, and the Diffs Agent is what keeps it accurate afterward, reading each pull request's diff and updating only the tests that diff actually touches. Neither step depends on someone remembering to open Qase and edit a stale case before it starts failing for the wrong reason.

The math changes for the slice of your Qase backlog that's automatable regression coverage: checkout, login, core CRUD flows, the stuff that doesn't need human judgment to execute. Those cases stop being hand-authored records that a seat has to maintain, and start being generated and re-generated from the code itself. Is a per-seat TMS still the right spend for that slice? Usually not, since you'd be paying to store and organize cases that don't need a human author anymore. It's a different question for the parts of your process that genuinely need one: exploratory testing, compliance sign-off, and manual QA judgment calls that a codebase-first agent isn't built to replace. Qase, or Testmo, or PractiTest, still earns its per-seat fee for that half of the job. It's the automatable half where the fee stops making sense.

None of this argues for ripping Qase out on day one. If your team needs a durable, auditable record of manual and exploratory testing tied to defects and release sign-off, that's exactly the category Qase, Testmo, and PractiTest all compete in, and an agent that tests your UI doesn't replace that paperwork. The practical split most teams land on is keeping a smaller Qase seat count for the manual and compliance-driven testing that genuinely needs a human author, while letting the automatable regression coverage move off the per-seat backlog entirely. Fewer seats managing fewer hand-written cases is still a real reduction in the bill, even short of a full migration off Qase, and it is the slice where Autonoma belongs in the pricing conversation.

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