Resistance to traditional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) licensing is increasing. Industry experts note that the prevailing model of flat, per-seat monthly subscriptions has shifted from a budgeting inconvenience to a barrier for modern software architecture.
In an article published by Norwegian tech publication Kode24, Pål Lind, founder of Inzynk, urged MarTech buyers to stop supporting outdated licensing schemes and move away from the current digital “tollbooth” model.
Lind explains that the conflict between modern development workflows and legacy pricing models is especially challenging for teams integrating new tools. Rather than promoting technology adoption, per-user seat fees discourage it.
A Distortion in Enterprise Tech
For the past decade, per-seat licensing has been the standard monetization model for business-to-business (B2B) platforms. Companies often pay significant monthly fees to provide employees with access to a login portal, regardless of usage frequency or the tool’s measurable value.
This issue is especially pronounced in marketing technology (MarTech) and advertising technology (AdTech). Lind notes that businesses in these sectors may allocate large amounts of their marketing budgets to software access fees, often before any API calls are made, or data is transferred.
“When did we start building digitised tollbooths instead of charging for value?” Lind asks, challenging organisations to examine how commercial gatekeeping has skewed engineering priorities.
The Hidden Architectural Costs
Beyond financial overhead, Lind outlines three major structural bottlenecks created by per-seat monetisation:
- Constrained Adoption and Fragile Workarounds: When each additional user increases costs, organisations limit access. To avoid seat quotas, they often spend time creating temporary solutions such as shared credentials, manual data exports, and internal tools.
- Chronic Feature and UI Bloat: To justify recurring per-user fees during contract renewals, vendors often add unnecessary interface modules, redundant features, and superficial AI components. As a result, efficient web applications can become slow and difficult to maintain.
- Decoupling Price from Infrastructure Costs: In modern cloud environments with serverless computing and automated scaling, charging fixed fees per user is not aligned with actual infrastructure usage. Fixed seat prices do not reflect compute cycles, memory allocation, or network traffic.
Consumer software (B2C), mostly, moved away from per-user access fees years ago, as consumers do not expect to pay simply to browse an e-commerce platform. Lind argues that B2B software should make a similar transition.
Building the Alternative: Utility Over Access
To break free from this legacy trap, Lind advocates aligning software business models with actual cloud infrastructure usage, as in Inzynk’s case with the media spend.
Developing applications with a zero baseline platform fee shifts the focus from building complex access-control systems to restricting users to a solution where the cost reflects usage. This openness enables seamless integration with customer data pipelines and stops the need to showcase numerous features that are there to justify the seat.
Retiring the Digital Tollgate
The resistance to traditional SaaS models reflects a growing commitment among marketing & technical leaders to reduce unnecessary friction in enterprise systems. As software increasingly separates human involvement from automated data processes, the justification for per-seat charges is diminishing.
For developers creating the next generation of web applications, priorities are shifting. The focus is now on building lean, open systems that charge only for the measurable utility they deliver, rather than maintaining outdated commercial restrictions.
