Per-user licenses: why your software bill grows with every hire

You hire a team leader. He needs access to the schedule, to time tracking, to the company's messaging, sometimes to the quoting software. Each of these tools is priced per user: your new hire has just added four lines to four bills.

The short answer: with per-user licensing, your software bill follows your headcount, not your usage. The useful answer means doing the math once, with your own tools.

The principle: you pay for people, not for a service#

Software sold "per user per month" carries a price that looks modest: a few euros, a few tens of euros. That is deliberate. The figure isn't meant to be read on its own, it is meant to be multiplied.

It gets multiplied twice. First by the number of people. Then by the number of tools, because a field business rarely stacks fewer than four or five. The more the company grows, the more it pays, even if everyone uses the tool exactly as before.

The math on an example#

Take an electrical contractor with 12 people growing to 25 over two years. It uses four tools billed per user. The prices are cautious assumptions.

The bill has almost doubled. Nothing changed in the way people work: same screens, same buttons, same habits. Only the headcount moved.

The most telling number is the cost of one hire. One more field worker is €12 + €8 + €6 = €26 a month, so €312 a year in licenses, before he has set foot on a job site. One more person in the office, with quoting access, comes to €66 a month, or €792 a year.

Redo the math for your business#

1. List every piece of software billed per user.
2. Write down the monthly price per user as it appears on the latest invoice, not on the pricing page.
3. Add up the prices of the tools a new field employee needs: that is the monthly cost of a field hire. Do the same for the office.
4. Multiply by the number of hires planned over three years.

If you have never listed all your tools, start with the half-day method.

The three traps that inflate the bill#

1. Accounts of people who left#

An employee leaves the company. You take back the badge, the phone, the keys. The scheduling account stays open and billed, because nobody thought to close it with each vendor.

2. Pricing tiers#

Many plans change level above a certain number of users. The eleventh account doesn't cost the price of one account: it moves the whole team to the higher plan.

3. The field team you don't connect#

This is the most expensive trap, and it shows up on no invoice. To keep licenses down, field teams get no access. The team leader sends his hours by text, someone in the office types them in again. Or three people share one account, and nobody knows who entered what.

The license you saved is then paid for in hours of re-keying and in mistakes. The cost has simply moved from one bill to another column, the one nobody adds up.

The grid to sort things out#

For each tool, ask these four questions.

If an off-the-shelf tool does the job, take it. We will tell you, and it happens.

Per-user software isn't a bad choice in itself. For a stable team of five, it is often the simplest. The problem starts when the company grows fast and every tool grows with it.

What changes with an application built for your company#

An application built for your company replaces the stacked tools with a single place: quotes, scheduling, time tracking and documents live in the same application. And we charge no per-user license.

In practice, when you hire:

• you create the new worker's access in a minute, from the team screen;
• he sees his schedule and logs his hours on his phone from day one;
• when he leaves, you close his access in one place;
• the bill doesn't move.

Giving the whole field team access becomes free, and that is where re-keying disappears. To see what the application itself costs, we have detailed what drives the price of a custom business application. The approach is described on the your application page.

Per-user licenses: the key takeaways#

With per-user pricing, your software bill follows your headcount. Do the math once: add up what one more employee costs on each tool, then multiply by your planned hires.

Close the accounts of people who left, watch the pricing tiers, and put a figure on the field team left without access. That is often where the biggest line is hiding.