Per-seat licensing looks reasonable - until you watch how people behave under it inside an organisation. When you have to pay $X a month for every user you add, you turn every access decision into a negotiation. Department heads hoard licences they fought to get, and new hires wait weeks while procurement decides whether they qualify for a seat. People share logins, violating terms of service and opening real security gaps, because the alternative means justifying another line item to finance. None of this is malicious; it's just what rational people do when you put a per-head price tag on access.
Companies lose more than convenience to this.
When they ration access by cost, the teams that would benefit never get the tool.
They leave data in silos because the people who'd connect it aren't licensed to touch it. People invent workarounds and workarounds - and they're always worse than the tool they replace. This should bother any vendor honest enough to look: under a straight per-seat model, the vendor suppresses its own adoption inside accounts that already pay it.
It amounts to this:
You sold your users the software and then priced them out of using it.
Drop the access tax
Price by credits and you take the access decision off the table. You grant accounts broadly and let people use them as they need to. The person who needs the tool twice a year and the person who needs it twice a day can both have logins, and nobody has to sit in a meeting working out whether the occasional user "deserves" a seat.
That works because we and the customer finally want the same thing. When more people have access, they run more workflows, the customer gets more value, and we earn more revenue. Under seat pricing, the vendor profits by restricting usage to the people who pay; under credit pricing, the vendor profits when people use the tool. We'd rather be on the side that wants you using the tool.
The overage question
The obvious objection is variability. When you commit plus pay overages, you take on forecasting work you don't face under flat per-seat licensing. Budget $500 a month, then have an unexpectedly busy quarter, and you'll pay overage rates on the extra usage. Some finance teams find that uncomfortable.
That's a fair worry. But think about when you hit overages. You hit them when your team is busier than you expected, when you're pushing more work through the system and presumably supporting or protecting more revenue while you do it. You end up paying more for your workflow tools during your busiest stretch, exactly when you're getting the most out of them.
Now compare the failure mode on the other side. Under seat licensing, when you surge you hit your user cap, and then your agents drown in tickets while new people wait for procurement to approve more seats. With one model you pay a bit more when you're winning; with the other, your customers wait when you can least afford it.
We already tilt the structure toward heavy users. Higher-volume customers cost us less to serve per transaction, so Enterprise customers at $1,000 a month get 10% more credits per dollar than Foundation customers at $100. We price each tier on what it costs us to serve, and we pass the saving back to those customers.
What you signal when you sell seats
Step back from the mechanics and the customer reads your price tag as a message. When you bill per seat, you train the customer to count heads, to weigh whether each person earns a login before handing one over. They learn to ration your product, which is the behaviour that hurt them in the first place.
Vendors could justify seat pricing back when access was the product, and they grew as their customers added seats. Customers have stopped expanding headcount the way they used to. They get value from your software when work gets done, so charge them when it does. Drop the access tax, give the tool to everyone who could use it, and bill them for what they do instead of for their place on the org chart.
