The death of per-seat pricing

A 15-person company hires 10 more people. Great news. That same month, without changing a single feature, their SaaS bill goes up 67%. Did the product improve? No. Is there more data? Barely. The only thing that happened is more occupied chairs.

That's per-seat pricing: a tax on growth disguised as a business model.

Growing shouldn't cost more

The marginal cost of one extra user in a typical SaaS is measured in cents: one more row in the users table, a little more bandwidth, nothing else. Yet the price goes up in whole multiples of the plan. $30 per user per month to move cards. $50 per user per month to store contacts.

Do the math: a 50-person team pays $18,000 a year for a project manager whose infrastructure costs under $100 a month. 99% of that bill isn't cost — it's a toll. And it's a toll that scales with your success: the more you hire, the more you pay. No other industry punishes growth like this.

Per-seat corrupts the product

The damage isn't just the invoice. Per-seat pricing changes how people use software, always for the worse:

• Shared accounts. The team passes the "sales@company.com" credentials around five people. Goodbye audit trail, goodbye permissions, goodbye per-person history. A security problem created by the pricing page.
• Excluded teams. The CRM stays sales-only because giving support or leadership access "costs too much". Half the company works off stale data in a parallel spreadsheet.
• Offboarding rituals. Someone leaves and you race to deactivate their seat before the billing cycle renews. License administration: the job nobody asked for.

The result is paradoxical: you pay for a collaboration tool, and the price forces you to collaborate less.

The real cost is infrastructure

What actually consumes resources? Compute, storage, bandwidth. All of that has a public price and gets cheaper every year. What doesn't consume resources is a seat.

That's why our model is different: the software is open source and costs $0; if we run it for you, you pay for the infrastructure you use, at cost, with zero margin. Unlimited users, always. Bring the whole team, the team next door and the intern. The bill doesn't change because more people are inside; it changes if you use more machine.

Link already works this way: shorten links, measure clicks, add whoever you want. And it's exactly what Track, CRM and Cal will have when they arrive.

What you're paying today

Run the numbers: add up the seats across all your tools and divide the total by the real cost of a server. That ratio is the margin you're being charged for sitting down.

Per-seat pricing won't die because we say so. It will die when companies run those numbers. And more and more of them are.