A full-featured applicant tracking system that helps you attract, manage, and hire talent faster. Free forever, with AI screening you can switch on per role when volume gets painful.
An applicant tracking system (ATS) is software that holds a hiring process in one place. It publishes your open roles, collects applications in a structured form, moves each candidate through defined pipeline stages, and keeps notes, scores, and stage history on the candidate record so an entire hiring team can see the same thing at the same time.
The reason a tracking system exists at all is that hiring is a shared process with a long memory. One person can hold a search in their head. Four people cannot, and the moment several colleagues interview in parallel, feedback ends up in direct messages, two people contact the same candidate, and nobody can say how long the process actually takes. A pipeline is the structure that prevents that.
HireCade's applicant tracking system is free with unlimited jobs, unlimited candidates, and unlimited team seats, and it stays free as you grow. There is no trial clock, no candidate cap that quietly triggers a sales call, and no feature held back for a paid tier. You do not need a card to sign up.
What we charge for is the AI work that costs money to run: scoring resumes against your job description at $0.10 per resume, and conducting screening interviews at $5 per interview. Those are switched on per role and never required. If you only ever use the pipeline and the careers page, you never pay anything.
Applicant tracking has been sold as enterprise software for twenty years, which is why a five-person company still gets quoted a per-seat annual contract to do something a spreadsheet almost handles. The software itself is not the hard part any more.
So we stopped charging for it. The applicant tracking system is free with unlimited jobs, unlimited candidates, and unlimited seats, and it stays free as you grow. There is no trial clock, no candidate cap that triggers a sales call, and no feature held back for a paid tier.
What we charge for is the AI work that costs us money to run: scoring resumes against your job description, and conducting the screening interviews. You add those per resume or per interview when you want them, and never pay for the months you do not.
A modern pipeline from application to offer, with stages, notes, and status changes in one place instead of an inbox and a spreadsheet.
Launch a careers site in minutes at your own company URL, with your logo and open roles listed automatically.
Post as many roles as you need and review as many applicants as they attract. No cap that quietly turns into an upgrade prompt.
Add every hiring manager and interviewer without counting licences, so feedback lives on the candidate record rather than in Slack.
Cade plugs into the same pipeline to rank resumes and run screening interviews. Turn it on for one role and off for the next.
See where candidates stall, how long each stage takes, and which sources actually produce hires.
The honest version, so nothing surprises you later.
Included at no cost
Usage-based, only if you want it
These cost us money to run, so we charge for them. Nothing here is required to use the tracking system.
Resume ranking
$0.10 per resumeAI scores each resume against your job description and explains the score.
AI interview screening
$5 per interviewAn AI video or voice interview with a score, transcript, and cheating detection per candidate.
Full-service recruiting
10% retainer, 20% on placementWe run the whole search when you would rather hand the role over entirely.
Employer of Record
$499 per employee / monthWe become the legal employer so you can hire in countries where you have no entity.
Five steps from an empty account to a pipeline your whole team can see. Only the last one costs anything, and it is optional.
No card, no sales call, no trial countdown. You are in the product in under two minutes, and nothing about the account expires or downgrades later.
Write the role or paste an existing description. Your branded careers page updates itself, so the role is live at your own company URL without anyone touching a website.
Define the stages a candidate moves through so the process is explicit rather than remembered. Stages are what make reporting meaningful later, because they turn a vague sense that hiring is slow into a specific stage where people wait.
Add every hiring manager and interviewer without counting licences. Feedback then lives on the candidate record instead of in Slack, which is the single biggest practical difference between a tracking system and a spreadsheet.
When a role attracts more applicants than anyone can read carefully, switch on resume ranking at $0.10 per resume or AI interview screening at $5 per interview. Turn it on for one role and off for the next.
You need a real pipeline and a careers page, not a procurement process. Free means you can start today and justify nothing to anyone.
Once several people interview in parallel, a shared sheet starts losing feedback and dropping candidates. This is the point most teams switch.
Unlimited jobs and seats means you can run many client searches at once without licence maths on every new coordinator.
If you are paying per seat for tracking alone, the same workflow is free here, and AI screening costs less than most per-seat add-ons.
Strip away the category language and an applicant tracking system does four things. It publishes your open roles somewhere candidates can find and apply to them. It collects those applications in a consistent structure rather than as whatever file each person happened to attach. It moves each candidate through named stages so the process is explicit rather than remembered. And it keeps notes, scores, and stage history attached to the person, so anyone involved can see what has already happened.
Those four things sound administrative, and they are, but the value is not administration. It is shared memory. Hiring is a process with several participants, long gaps between interactions, and consequences for getting details wrong. A candidate who was strong but rejected for one role is worth remembering when a different role opens. An interviewer's concern from three weeks ago is worth reading before the next conversation. None of that survives in an inbox.
The second thing a tracking system does, almost as a by-product, is make the process measurable. Once stages exist, you can see where candidates stall, how long each stage takes, and which sources actually produce hires. Before stages exist, the only available observation is that hiring feels slow, which is not something anyone can act on.
It is worth being clear about what an applicant tracking system does not do. It does not find candidates, it does not decide who is good, and it will not fix a process that is slow because decisions are not being made. It holds the process. Sourcing and screening are separate problems solved by separate products, and buying a tracking system expecting it to solve them is the most common disappointment in this category.
Applicant tracking has been sold as enterprise software for twenty years, which is why a five-person company still gets quoted a per-seat annual contract to do something a spreadsheet almost handles. Charging per seat for tracking software mostly taxes small teams for having colleagues, and it produces the specific bad outcome of interviewers sharing a login because nobody wanted to buy another licence.
So we stopped charging for it. The applicant tracking system is free with unlimited jobs, unlimited candidates, and unlimited team seats, including the branded careers page on your own company URL and pipeline reporting with stage analytics. It stays free as you grow. There is no trial clock, no candidate cap that quietly triggers a sales call, and no feature held back for a paid tier.
The line is drawn at the work that costs us money to run. AI resume ranking is $0.10 per resume, because scoring every application against a job description and explaining the score consumes real compute. AI interview screening is $5 per interview, because conducting a video or voice interview and returning a score, transcript, and cheating detection does the same. Both are switched on per role and neither is required to use the tracking system.
The other paid things are services rather than software, and they are priced accordingly: full-service recruiting at a 10% retainer with a 20% placement fee against first-year base salary, and Employer of Record at $499 per employee per month for hires in countries where you have no entity. Those are separate decisions that most teams using the free tier never make.
The honest business logic is worth stating, because free software usually has a catch and it is fair to ask what ours is. Our business is the AI recruiting work. Giving away the pipeline that work happens inside is how you end up with the option to use it. If you never upgrade, the free tier still costs us very little to run, which is why we can leave it free rather than degrading it over time.
Posting a role is the easy half. You write the description or paste one you already have, and the careers page updates itself, so the role goes live at your own company URL without anyone touching a website or waiting on whoever owns it. Applications then arrive structured, into a pipeline, rather than as attachments in a shared inbox that someone has to triage by hand.
The pipeline is the half that changes how hiring feels. Stages make the process explicit: what has to happen to a candidate, in what order, and who is responsible at each point. Most teams already have stages, they are just implicit, which means they are remembered differently by different people and applied inconsistently under time pressure.
Designing stages is worth ten minutes of thought and rarely gets it. The useful principle is that a stage should represent a decision, not an activity. Screening call is an activity. Passed screening is a decision. When stages represent decisions, the pipeline shows you where candidates are waiting for someone to make one, which is where hiring processes actually stall. When stages represent activities, everything looks busy and nothing is diagnosable.
Keep the number of stages small. Every stage is a place a candidate can sit, a status someone has to update, and a handoff that can be dropped. A process with five clear stages is followed. A process with twelve is approximated, and the approximation differs by recruiter, which quietly destroys the reporting you built the stages for in the first place.
Once stages exist and are used, pipeline reporting becomes meaningful. You can see where candidates stall, how long each stage takes, and which sources produce hires rather than just applications. That last distinction matters more than most teams expect: the source that produces the most applications and the source that produces the most hires are frequently not the same one.
The moment hiring involves more than one person, coordination becomes the main cost. Two people contact the same candidate. An interviewer's feedback is given verbally and never written down. A hiring manager asks where a candidate got to and three people give different answers. None of these are exotic failures, they are the normal condition of hiring without shared records.
Per-seat licensing makes this worse in a specific and predictable way. When each additional user costs money, teams limit who gets an account, which means the people doing the interviews are often not the people with access. Feedback then arrives through Slack messages and hallway conversations, gets summarised by whoever does have access, and loses the detail that made it useful. The licence model has quietly reshaped the process.
Unlimited seats remove that distortion. Every hiring manager and interviewer can be added, so feedback lands on the candidate record where the next person will actually read it. This also changes the quality of feedback, because writing an assessment where a colleague will see it produces more careful reasoning than saying it out loud in a corridor.
The other benefit is continuity. People leave, roles get reopened, and a candidate who was nearly right for one job is often exactly right for another six months later. When the history sits on the record rather than in one recruiter's memory, that continuity survives staff changes, which is when it matters most.
Most migrations fail on scope rather than on tooling. Teams decide to move everything, discover that everything includes four years of closed roles and candidates nobody remembers, and stall halfway with data in two places. The fix is to be ruthless about what actually needs to move.
Migrate active roles and active candidates. That is usually a small list, it is the part where accuracy matters, and it is the part your team will notice if it is wrong. Closed roles and dormant candidates can stay where they are, and the old system can age out on its own schedule rather than being lifted wholesale into the new one.
The mechanics are straightforward. Export your open roles and active candidates from your existing system and import them into your pipeline. Coming from a spreadsheet, the work is mostly deciding which columns are actually stages and which were notes, which is a useful exercise in itself because it forces the implicit process to be written down.
The part that makes this low risk is that there is nothing to sign and no seat count to negotiate. You can run both systems in parallel for a few weeks, put new applications into the new pipeline while the old one finishes what it started, and switch fully when you are confident. Most migrations that go badly went badly because a contract start date forced a cutover before anyone was ready.
One thing worth doing during a migration rather than after it: agree the stage design before importing. Importing candidates into stages inherited from a system you are leaving tends to preserve a process you had already decided was not working.
The AI products are capabilities on the same pipeline rather than a separate system, which is the point of giving the pipeline away. There is no migration, no second login, and no decision to make in advance. You switch something on for one role, see whether it helped, and leave it off for the next one if it did not.
Resume ranking earns its place when a role attracts more applications than attention can sustain. Reading four hundred resumes fairly is not a thing humans do; what actually happens is that the first fifty are read carefully and the rest are skimmed at increasing speed. Ranking scores every application against your job description and explains the score, at $0.10 per resume, which means the whole pile gets the same treatment.
AI interview screening addresses the next bottleneck, which appears once the shortlist is reasonable but first-round calls are consuming everyone's week. It runs a video or voice interview per candidate and returns a score, a transcript, and cheating detection, at $5 per interview. The questions adapt to the job description, so it is not limited to coding assessments and works for non-technical roles too.
The judgement call is when to use them, and the honest answer is later than most vendors suggest. For a role with thirty applicants you almost certainly do not need either; at four hundred, ranking is the difference between reviewing everyone and reviewing the first fifty. Plenty of teams use the tracking system on its own indefinitely and run every interview themselves, which is a perfectly good way to hire.
Beyond the AI, two further products plug into the same pipeline. Interview as a Service puts expert human interviewers on your technical loops when senior engineering time is the constraint rather than volume. Full-service recruiting hands the entire search over at a 10% retainer with a 20% placement fee against first-year base salary. Both are separate decisions, and neither changes anything about the free tier.
The usual reason teams hesitate over a free tool is a suspicion that the price of entry is being locked in later. It is a fair suspicion, because the standard move in this category is to make data easy to put in and awkward to take out, then have the retrieval conversation at renewal.
Your candidate data stays yours and you can export it. We do not hold candidate records hostage to force a renewal, largely because there is no renewal to force. That is the structural point rather than a promise: a free tier with no contract has no leverage moment built into it, because there is no date on which we get to ask you for something.
Nothing in the free tier degrades over time either. There is no point at which storage fills, a candidate cap arrives, or a feature you were relying on moves behind a paid tier. The paid products are additions rather than restorations of things that were quietly taken away.
The practical consequence is that evaluating this costs you very little. You can import active roles, run a search, and export everything if you decide against it, without a procurement process or a cancellation conversation. That is a deliberately low-stakes offer, and the reason we can make it is that our business is the AI work rather than the pipeline it happens in.
All three can run a hiring process. They differ on what they cost, how long they take to start, and how many of your colleagues you are willing to give access to.
| HireCade free ATS | A spreadsheet and an inbox | Enterprise talent suite | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free forever, with usage-based AI added only if you want it | Free, until you count the hours and the lost candidates | Typically a per-seat annual contract, negotiated and signed |
| Time to start | Minutes, with no card and no sales call | Immediate, because the sheet already exists | Weeks or months, through procurement and implementation |
| Team seats | Unlimited, so every interviewer can be added | Unlimited, but with no permissions or audit of who changed what | Licensed per seat, which is what makes people share logins |
| Where candidate feedback lives | On the candidate record, visible to the whole hiring team | In direct messages, email threads, and one person's memory | On the candidate record, if everyone has a licence to reach it |
| How applications arrive | Structured, through a branded careers page on your own URL | As attachments in an inbox, formatted however the applicant chose | Structured, usually through a configured careers portal |
| Duplicate and dropped candidates | Prevented by a shared pipeline with stage history | The most common failure, and usually invisible until it embarrasses you | Prevented, assuming the process is configured and followed |
| Reporting | Pipeline reporting and stage analytics included free | Whatever you build by hand, kept up to date by nobody | Extensive, and often the main reason large organisations buy one |
| AI screening | Optional, usage-based at $0.10 per resume and $5 per interview | Not available without bolting on another tool | Often an add-on module, priced per seat or per contract |
| Getting your data out | Yours to export, with no renewal to hold it against | Trivially, because it is already a file | Possible, though the timing usually coincides with a renewal conversation |
| Where it stops fitting | If you need deep enterprise HRIS workflows and procurement-grade configuration | As soon as more than one person interviews | When the per-seat cost outgrows the value for a team of your size |
An enterprise suite is the right answer for some organisations. If your actual requirement is a pipeline several people can see, the same workflow is free here.
An applicant tracking system is software that holds a hiring process in one place. It publishes your open roles, collects applications in a structured form, moves candidates through defined pipeline stages, and keeps notes, scores, and stage history on the candidate record so the whole hiring team sees the same thing.
What it does not do is find candidates or decide who is good. Sourcing and screening are separate problems, which is why buying a tracking system and expecting more applicants is the most common disappointment in this category.
Actually free, with no time limit. Unlimited jobs, unlimited candidates, and unlimited team seats, and we do not ask for a card to sign up.
The paid parts are clearly separate and usage-based: $0.10 per resume for AI ranking and $5 per AI screening interview. If you never use them, you never pay anything.
The full applicant tracking system with all stages and features, a branded careers page on your own company URL, unlimited job postings, unlimited candidates per role, unlimited team members and interviewers, and pipeline reporting with stage analytics.
There is no trial clock, no candidate cap that triggers a sales call, and no feature held back for a paid tier. Nothing in the free tier degrades over time.
Because tracking software is no longer the scarce thing, and charging per seat for it mostly taxes small teams for having colleagues.
Our business is the AI recruiting work: screening resumes and running interviews at a volume humans cannot. Giving away the pipeline that work happens inside is how you end up with the option to use it. If you never upgrade, the free tier still costs us very little to run.
It stays yours and you can export it. We do not hold candidate records hostage to force a renewal, largely because there is no renewal to force.
Nothing in the free tier degrades over time, so there is no point at which you are pushed into paying to keep access to your own pipeline.
No. Plenty of teams use the tracking system on its own and run every interview themselves.
AI screening earns its place at volume. For a role with 30 applicants you probably do not need it; at 400 it is the difference between reviewing everyone and reviewing the first 50 before you lose patience.
A spreadsheet works until more than one person interviews. Then feedback ends up in direct messages, two people contact the same candidate, and nobody can say how long the process actually takes.
The pipeline keeps notes, scores, and stage history on the candidate record, and the careers page means applications arrive structured rather than as attachments in an inbox. Unlimited seats matter here too, because per-seat pricing is what pushes interviewers out of the system and their feedback into Slack.
The tracking workflow is the same shape: roles, applications, stages, feedback, and reporting. The differences are cost, time to start, and how many people you are willing to give access to, because per-seat licensing is what makes teams ration accounts.
Enterprise suites earn their place where deep HRIS workflows, procurement-grade configuration, and extensive reporting are genuine requirements. If your actual need is a pipeline several people can see, the same workflow is free here.
Export your open roles and active candidates from your existing system and import them into your pipeline. Most teams migrate active roles only and let the old system age out with closed ones, which keeps the migration small enough to finish.
Because there is nothing to sign and no seat count to negotiate, you can run both in parallel for a few weeks and switch when you are confident. Agree your stage design before importing, so you do not inherit a process you had already decided was not working.
Make each stage represent a decision rather than an activity. Passed screening is a decision; screening call is an activity. When stages are decisions, the pipeline shows you where candidates are waiting for someone to decide, which is where hiring processes actually stall.
Keep the count small. A process with five clear stages gets followed; one with twelve gets approximated differently by each person, which quietly destroys the reporting the stages were meant to produce.
Yes. The careers page carries your logo and branding, and lists your open roles automatically as you post them.
Candidates apply directly into your pipeline, so you are not stitching together a form builder and an inbox rule.
Yes. The pipeline is role-agnostic, and our screening pool spans engineering, healthcare, legal, sales, marketing, and operations.
AI interview screening adapts its questions to the job description, so it is not limited to coding assessments.
Unusually well suited, because unlimited jobs and unlimited seats means running many client searches at once without doing licence arithmetic every time a coordinator joins.
The usual constraint on agency tooling is per-seat cost scaling with a team that changes size often, and that constraint does not exist here.
AI resume ranking and AI interview screening are the usage-based additions at $0.10 per resume and $5 per interview. Interview as a Service puts expert human interviewers on your technical loops when senior engineering time rather than volume is the bottleneck.
Full-service recruiting hands the entire search over at a 10% retainer with a 20% placement fee against first-year base salary. And if a hire lives in a country where you have no entity, Employer of Record handles the employment at $499 per employee per month.
The tracking system is the pipeline everything else plugs into. These are the capabilities you can add to it, and the services that take over once you have made an offer.
Resume ranking at $0.10 per resume and AI screening interviews at $5 each, switched on per role.
Expert human interviewers run technical loops when senior engineering time is the bottleneck.
A curated shortlist of strong candidates in your inbox every Monday.
Everything we do, grouped by whether you need to find, hire, employ, or research people.
Every price in one place, including the services that are quoted rather than published.
Pre-vetted engineers across frontend, backend, mobile, infrastructure, and machine learning.
Labelling and RLHF teams for training data at scale.
Technical SEO, content strategy, and link acquisition specialists.
Researchers and outbound representatives hired against a pipeline target.
Design, engineering, and QA assembled as one team around your roadmap.
Employ someone in a country where you have no entity, at $499 per employee per month.
Engage genuinely independent contractors without carrying misclassification risk.
Sponsorship and relocation, with a free eligibility review before you make the offer.
A configured laptop and role-scoped access ready before the first day.
Talk to verified professionals when you need to learn from a market rather than hire in it.
Everything HireCade offers candidates, in one place.
Practise explaining your reasoning out loud, with scoring and feedback.
Real questions organised by company and role.
Build and publish a resume aimed at the screen before any interview.
Benchmark a band before you post a role, or an offer before you accept one.
Create your account and post your first job in the next few minutes. No card, no sales call, no trial countdown.
