A team that doubles in November and halves in January

Seasonal headcount is the pricing problem

Most messaging tools price around contact tiers or user seats, which means you either pay year-round for a December-sized team or spend January renegotiating your plan.

Airhorn is $5 a month plus $0.75 per confirmed employee. Take on twelve seasonal hires and you pay $9 more that month. Archive them in January and it comes back off. There is no tier to cross and no contract to renegotiate.

The retail broadcast calendar

Retail messaging is unusually predictable — most of it clusters around recurring events:

• Truck day.The delivery moved, it’s bigger than expected, or it’s arriving before open and someone needs to be there.
• Inventory counts. Usually after hours, usually all hands, usually rescheduled at least once.
• Floor sets and resets. A new display going in overnight before a promotion starts.
• Promotions and price changes.Staff who don’t know about the sale get corrected by customers, which is a bad way to learn.
• Extended and holiday hours. Especially in malls, where the landlord sets them and they change more than anyone expects.
• Weather closures and late opens. The one message that absolutely cannot be missed.

Seasonal hires are the hardest people to reach

A November hire has worked six shifts, hasn’t installed your scheduling app, doesn’t know the assistant manager’s name, and isn’t in the group text because nobody rebuilt it. They are also on the schedule for the busiest days of your year.

Adding them to Airhorn takes a name and a phone number. They get a confirmation text, reply YES, and receive the next broadcast — no app install, no account setup, no onboarding step that competes with actually training them.

More than one store

If you run two or three locations, a single group thread means the downtown staff read every message about the mall store. People learn to skim, and skimming is how a closure gets missed.

Airhorn’s Plus plan includes Groups, so each location is its own list and you can still send to everyone when it genuinely applies to everyone.

If you already use Homebase or When I Work

Keep them for scheduling, time clocks, and labor compliance — Airhorn does none of that. Their built-in messaging is worth trying first, and if your team has genuinely adopted the app, you may not need anything else.

The check worth running: pick a recent important message and find out how many people actually opened it. On teams with heavy seasonal turnover the number is often well under everyone, and the gap is concentrated among your newest hires. If that’s what you find, a text is the layer to add for the messages that have to land.

What it costs an 18-person store

Add twelve seasonal hires in November and the roster of 30 moves onto Plus at $31.50 for those months, then drops back down when the season ends.