There is a specific moment I have now watched happen at several companies. Someone asks for a login for a new hire, and the answer comes back: that will be another $180 a month, and we’re at the cap on this plan anyway.
And then, quietly, the company decides not to give that person a login.
That is the moment per-seat pricing stops being a line item and starts being an operating constraint. Your software vendor just made a staffing decision on your behalf.
The visible cost is the small one
A carrier I work with was paying $2,100 a month for a TMS hard-capped at 10 logins. They had more than 60 employees.
The $2,100 was the part they could see on an invoice. Here is what it was actually buying them.
Shared passwords
Ten logins across 60 people means credentials get shared. Now nobody knows who changed a load status, your audit trail is fiction, and offboarding an employee means rotating a password that eight other people use.
This is also the quiet compliance problem. Every shared login is a control failure waiting to be found by whoever audits you next.
Queueing for screens
Dispatchers waiting for a free session is pure wasted salary. If three people lose twenty minutes a day to this, at a loaded cost of $30/hour, that is roughly $650 a month — a third of the subscription again, burned invisibly.
The shadow spreadsheet layer
This is the expensive one. When people cannot get into the system, they do their work beside it. Someone builds a spreadsheet. It becomes load-bearing. Now your operation runs on a file that has no backup, no permissions, no validation, and exactly one person who understands it.
Every shadow spreadsheet is a second, unmanaged system of record. You are paying to maintain two.
The decisions you stop making
The worst cost does not show up anywhere. You stop hiring the extra dispatcher because of the seat cost. You do not give the night shift access because it is not worth another licence. You do not onboard the new yard team because the plan upgrade is steep.
Software should expand what your business can do. Per-seat pricing at scale does the opposite.
Why vendors price this way
Not out of malice — per-seat is simply the pricing model that maps revenue to customer growth. It works genuinely well for tools where each user gets individual value: a design tool, a CRM seat for a salesperson.
It works badly for operational systems, where the value is that everyone is in the same place. A dispatch system that only 10 of your 60 people can reach is not a system of record. It is a bottleneck with a subscription.
The mismatch gets worse the more operational the software is, and the bigger your team gets. That is the tax: it scales with exactly the thing you are trying to do.
The arithmetic that changes the decision
Do not compare the subscription to a build. Compare the fully loaded cost of renting to the fully loaded cost of owning.
For the carrier above:
- Subscription: $2,100/month
- Seats they would add if seats were free: 12, at the vendor’s $180 rate = $2,160/month of capacity they were choosing not to buy
- Wasted time queueing: roughly $650/month
So the real monthly cost of that system was closer to $4,900 than $2,100 — and that still ignores the spreadsheet risk.
Against a one-time build in the mid five figures with $200/month hosting, that is not a close call. They broke even inside a year, and every employee has had their own account since day one.
You can run the same comparison for your own numbers with the payback calculator — it has a field specifically for the seats you are blocked from adding, because that is usually the number that flips the decision.
When per-seat is fine
To be fair to the model, and to save you a call:
- Small teams. Under about 15 users, per-seat pricing is usually cheaper than owning. Stay put.
- Tools where the user is the unit of value. A CRM seat per salesperson is priced correctly.
- Software you would never customise. If the generic version fits, generic is the right buy.
- Volatile headcount. Being able to drop seats matters if your team size swings.
The problem is not per-seat pricing. It is per-seat pricing on the system your whole operation depends on, at a headcount the model was not designed for.
What to check this week
- Count your actual employees, then count your licences. Note the gap.
- Ask your ops lead how many spreadsheets exist because people cannot get into the system.
- Get the per-seat rate from your contract and multiply it by the seats you have been avoiding.
- Add those up and compare it to your invoice. That difference is what the pricing model costs you.
If the gap is big and the pain is real, tell me what you’re running — I will tell you honestly whether owning beats renting for your operation, including when it does not. Or read what it looked like for SHM Transport, who went from 10 logins to every employee having their own.