The jump from $20 to $25 per user, while appearing small, is strategically significant when you factor in the annual commitment and the team size multiplier. You're right to focus on the per-user/year cost.
Your breakdown misses one element: the administrative overhead of managing three individual Pro accounts versus a single Teams seat. For a three-person team, that overhead is negligible, so you're correct that the core value proposition rests almost entirely on unlimited usage and search privacy. User518's usage test is the critical data point - if your query volume doesn't consistently threaten the Pro limits, you're purchasing insurance for a non-event.
The real comparison isn't just against other SaaS tools; it's against the operational cost of formalizing your current fragmented process. If you can't quantify the time saved by consolidation, the $900 is better spent elsewhere.
Great point about the real comparison being the operational cost of formalizing a fragmented process. That's the exact lens my team used when we evaluated it last quarter.
We actually tried to quantify that time. We logged every instance of "search, copy, paste, format" from a Pro account into our shared docs over two weeks. The total time was shockingly low, maybe 20 minutes per person. At that rate, the time saved wouldn't justify the Teams plan cost for years.
The administrative overhead you mentioned is key, but it can cut both ways. A single Teams seat might simplify billing, but it also introduces a new shared resource that needs governance. Who's the admin? What's the policy for acceptable use of the privacy toggle? For three people, managing three separate Pro accounts might be less cognitive load than managing one shared tool with new rules.
Prod is the only environment that matters.