Ask what an applicant tracking system costs per month and you will get a number. The number will be close to useless, for two reasons: the same product is sold under several pricing models that produce very different bills for the same usage, and companies buying in Turkey carry a cost that companies buying in dollars do not.
This is how to get to a figure that means something.
The three models
Per user, per month. You pay for each person with a login. The most common model on global platforms, and the easiest to compare on paper.
It becomes expensive in a specific situation: when hiring managers and interviewers need access. A ten-person recruiting function is one number. The same system opened to forty interviewing managers is four times that, and vendors differ enormously in whether a "read and comment" participant counts as a billable seat. That single definition can change the bill more than the headline rate does.
Per open position. You pay for active job postings, regardless of how many people use the system. This suits companies with steady hiring across a small number of roles, and punishes seasonal hiring — you pay peak rate during a recruitment push and carry the same plan through the quiet months, unless the contract genuinely allows scaling down, which most annual contracts do not.
Per volume. Priced on applications, candidates stored, or AI operations performed. This is increasingly how AI features are billed even when the core platform is per-seat.
Volume pricing is the one that surprises people, because the volume is not under your control. A single well-performing job posting can produce several times the applications you forecast. That is a good outcome for hiring and a bad one for a budget built on average months.
Currency, which is not a footnote here
Most global platforms bill in USD or EUR. If your revenue is in lira, the price you agreed is not the price you will pay.
This has two distinct effects that are worth separating.
Within the term, a monthly subscription in dollars means your lira cost moves every month. Budget variance that has nothing to do with your usage.
At renewal, you face the vendor's own price increase and the accumulated exchange-rate movement at the same time. Teams routinely plan for the first and not the second, and renewal arrives as a number nobody modelled.
Two practical mitigations: ask whether lira pricing is available at all, and if it is not, ask for a multi-year price lock in the original currency. Neither removes the exposure, but a locked rate converts an open-ended risk into one you can model.
What the list price does not include
Implementation and migration. Moving existing candidates, open positions and history into the new system. Sometimes bundled, often a separate one-time fee, occasionally quoted only after you have signed.
Integrations. In Turkey the ones that matter are the job boards — Kariyer.net, Secretcv — and whether pulling applications in is included or sold as an add-on. Check which of the two you are getting, because posting out and pulling in are very different amounts of saved work.
AI features. Increasingly priced separately from the platform: candidate matching, CV analysis, automated interviewing. Ask whether they sit inside the plan or bill per use, and if per use, what a realistic month looks like at your volume.
Extra users mid-term. Adding someone in month four usually costs the full annual rate pro-rated, or the full year. Worth knowing before your team grows.
Support tiers. Response times that match your working hours are sometimes a paid tier rather than the default.
Leaving. Export in a usable format at the end of the contract — not a PDF per candidate. This is rarely discussed at signing and occasionally expensive later.
Build the comparison that actually decides it
List prices side by side answer the wrong question. Build a three-year table using your own numbers instead:
- How many people need a login, split into full users and occasional participants
- How many positions you run at once, at peak and in a normal month
- How many applications you receive per year, using last year's actual figure
- Implementation and migration, once
- Integration costs for the boards you actually use
- AI usage at your real volume, not the sample in the pricing page
- Renewal increase, and for foreign-currency contracts a currency assumption you are willing to write down
Run each vendor through the same table. The ranking frequently changes between year one and year three, and the cheapest year-one option is often not the cheapest total — particularly where seat definitions are loose or AI is billed per use.
The cost that is not on any invoice
The largest cost of the wrong system is usually not its price. It is the work it fails to remove.
If applications do not arrive in the system automatically, someone re-enters them. If CV screening handles Turkish poorly, someone reads everything anyway. If interviewers cannot get in easily, feedback goes back to email and the record fragments.
That work has a salary cost, and it recurs every week. When you compare a cheaper platform against a more expensive one, the honest comparison includes the hours each leaves on your team — which is why the integration and language questions belong in a pricing discussion rather than a technical one.