Die versteckten Kosten der Nutzerlizenzierung

The operations director hired three field technicians in January. In February, the software bill increased by £540 per month. Not because the business was using the software more intensively. Not because any new functionality was unlocked. Simply because three more people existed who needed to log in.

He did not add them all to the system immediately. He thought about it. He ran the numbers. He decided two of them could share an account with a technician who was part-time.

The shared account lasted four months before an auditor flagged it during an insurance review. Shared logins meant the system couldn't establish who had done what. The audit trail was contaminated for the period the sharing had run. The remediation cost more time than the licence saving.

This is what per-user pricing does to operational decision-making. It turns access to a business's own operating system into a cost-benefit calculation. The outcome is consistently the same: degraded data integrity, workarounds that create new problems, and a slower, more friction-filled operation.

The Common Belief

Per-user pricing is the fairest model in enterprise software. You pay for what you use. More users means more value extracted. More value extracted means more the vendor should charge. The proportionality is the point.

Vendors present this model as aligned with the customer's success. "We only earn more when you grow." It sounds like partnership.

Why That Belief Is Wrong

The proportionality argument collapses when you ask a simple question: what does the software vendor actually provide that scales with the number of users?

The software is already built. Infrastructure cost per additional user is negligible — a few bytes of database storage, a few additional API calls. Support cost scales slightly with user volume. But the marginal cost of an additional user to the vendor is close to zero.

What scales in per-user pricing is not the vendor's cost. It is the vendor's revenue. The pricing model is not proportional to cost or to value delivered. It is proportional to headcount — a metric the vendor finds easy to count and the customer cannot avoid increasing as they grow.

This is not a subtle misalignment. The vendor has made themselves a percentage overhead on the customer's payroll. Every person hired increases the software bill. Every team added increases the software bill. Every phase of growth increases the software bill. The vendor benefits from the customer's growth without having contributed to it.

What Actually Happens

Per-user pricing creates three predictable failure modes.

Licence rationing. Businesses make decisions about who gets system access based on licence cost rather than operational need. Field staff who need the system once a day do not get access because the licence cost cannot be justified for occasional use. Customer-facing staff who need to answer client queries about account status are denied access for the same reason.

The people who are rationed out of the system become the weakest links in the operational chain. They work from printouts, phone calls, and outdated information. They make mistakes that better-informed people would not make. They create service failures that lose clients.

Workaround proliferation. Shared logins, shadow systems, manual processes, and data duplicated outside the ERP all expand to compensate for rationed access. Each workaround creates an integrity problem. Shared logins destroy the audit trail. Data maintained outside the system creates a version-of-record question that someone has to resolve manually. The ERP that was supposed to be the single source of truth becomes one of several competing records.

Adoption degradation. The business does not push system adoption aggressively because every additional user has a cost. Training is selective. Process compliance is uneven. The ERP works well for the core team who use it daily and is largely irrelevant to the broader organisation. The system's value is concentrated in a subset of the business that could have been served by a much simpler tool.

Real-World Example

Company: Castleton Recruitment Group
Industry: Specialist recruitment
Size: 95 staff, £12.4M revenue
Problem: Per-user licensing actively constraining operational capability

What happened:

Castleton's ERP licence covered 45 named users at £95 per user per month. The remaining 50 staff — largely consultants and resourcers — had no system access. They worked from exports, spreadsheets, and information relayed by colleagues who did have access.

When the business started losing placements to a competitor that was faster at confirming candidate availability and placement terms, the operations director ran an analysis. The finding was that decisions which required system data — candidate status, client terms, placement history — were taking an average of four hours longer at Castleton than at the competitor, because the people who needed the information did not have direct access to it.

The four-hour delay was the consequence of one decision: not buying licences for 50 people because it would cost £56,940 per year.

Outcome:

The revenue impact of the placement timing gap was estimated at £180,000 per year in lost fees — based on the value of opportunities the competitor had closed that Castleton had been pursuing simultaneously. The licence cost that was avoided: £56,940. Net cost of the saving: approximately £123,000 per year.

The operations director bought the additional licences after the analysis. The competitive gap closed within six weeks.

The business had spent four years optimising for licence cost and degrading operational capability. The saving was real. The cost was larger.

The Cost of Ignoring It

Revenue impact: Slower decisions, lower service quality, and more frequent errors all trace back eventually to rationed system access. Quantifying the revenue impact requires measurement that most businesses do not do — but the mechanisms are clear and consistent.

Data integrity cost: Shared logins, manual processes, and data maintained outside the system degrade data quality in ways that are expensive to recover. An audit trail contaminated by shared logins cannot be cleaned up retrospectively. A system that does not contain current customer data cannot be trusted. Once trust in the data is lost, the ERP's value as an operational system collapses.

Growth cost: Per-user pricing creates a direct tax on headcount growth. Every hiring wave increases the software bill. Every team expansion increases the software bill. In a growth phase, when cash is already under pressure, the per-user licence cost is a friction point in every hiring decision.

Investor perception: Businesses that present a financial model showing software costs increasing linearly with headcount are presenting a scaling problem. Investors expect the cost structure to improve as the business grows. A per-user software model does the opposite.

What Good Looks Like

Software pricing that is aligned with business reality charges for what the system actually does on behalf of the business — not for who logs in to access it.

Capacity-based pricing — charging for the volume of business activity the system processes rather than the number of people who use it — aligns the vendor's revenue with genuine system utilisation. Transactions processed, data stored, outputs generated: these reflect real infrastructure cost and real value delivered.

Unlimited user access with capacity-based pricing changes the operational dynamic entirely. Every person in the organisation who needs system access gets it. No licence rationing. No shared logins. No data maintained outside the system because access is too expensive. This matters most in businesses that outgrow their software stack — per-user costs are often the first thing that causes them to start rationing access at exactly the moment they need more of it.

When access is not rationed, adoption is not rationed. The system becomes the actual source of truth rather than the source of truth for the forty-five people who can afford to use it. Data quality improves because more interactions happen in the system. The audit trail is complete. Decisions are made faster because the information is directly accessible.

The business's relationship with its software vendor also changes. The vendor is not a growth tax. They are an infrastructure provider, charging for the capacity the business consumes. The vendor's revenue grows when the business's transaction volume grows — which happens when the business is performing well, not simply when it hires. That alignment is also why ERP implementation projects that add per-user licencing on top of a large upfront cost create such damaging total cost of ownership.

ENTMAZ Perspective

ENTMAZ charges for transactions and storage. Unlimited users, always. Not as a promotional offer or a competitive tactic. As the correct pricing model for an infrastructure service.

The operational case for unlimited users is the same as the operational case for unlimited access to any shared infrastructure. You do not charge employees per email sent. You do not charge per database query. You do not charge per document stored. These are infrastructure costs borne at the platform level. User access to that infrastructure is not the variable that drives cost.

Transaction volume drives infrastructure cost. Storage volume drives infrastructure cost. Headcount does not.

The pricing model reflects what the vendor actually provides. When the pricing is honest, the operational relationship is simpler and the alignment is genuine.

Conclusion

Per-user pricing is not fair. It is administratively convenient for the vendor and commercially damaging for the customer. The proportionality that sounds like alignment is a proportionality to the wrong variable.

The businesses that operate best on enterprise systems are the ones where every person who needs system access has it — without a licence cost calculation standing between the operational need and the access. That requires a pricing model built around what systems actually cost to operate.

Every £ saved on licence fees by rationing access has a cost on the other side of the ledger. It is rarely measured. It is consistently larger than the saving.

Key Takeaways

• Per-user pricing scales the vendor's revenue with headcount, not with infrastructure cost or value delivered — it is a growth tax, not a fair exchange
• Licence rationing creates predictable failure modes: degraded data integrity, workaround proliferation, and selective adoption that limits the system's value
• The operational cost of rationed access — slower decisions, service failures, and contaminated audit trails — typically exceeds the licence cost avoided
• Capacity-based pricing (transactions + storage) aligns vendor revenue with genuine system utilisation and removes the conflict between operational need and licence cost
• Unlimited user access is not a pricing gimmick — it is the condition under which enterprise systems can actually function as single sources of truth