Pricing software for businesses that count every rupee
A school with four hundred staff, a hospital with rotating shift workers, a distributor with sixty salesmen on the road — priced per user, all three will buy fewer licences than they have people, and share logins. The pricing model has then broken the audit trail it was sold with.
1 min readOadbox
Per-seat pricing has a second-order cost
Every shared login is a permission model defeated, an audit trail rendered meaningless and a support conversation about who did what that nobody can answer.
The vendor gets a slightly higher number on the contract and loses the thing that made the product valuable. It is a bad trade for both sides and it is nearly universal.
Price on the size of the business, not the number of logins
Students, beds, vehicles, units, employees on the roll — most verticals have a natural measure of scale that correlates with value and cannot be gamed by sharing a password.
- It scales with the customer's own growth, which feels fair to them.
- It removes the incentive to under-license and share credentials.
- It is predictable, which matters more than cheap for most buyers.
- It does not penalise rolling the software out more widely — which is what you want.
Be explicit about what implementation costs
Data migration, configuration and training take real effort and someone pays for them. Hiding them inside the licence fee makes the first year look cheap and creates pressure to under-deliver on exactly the phase that determines whether the rollout works.
Quoting them separately is a harder conversation at signature and a much easier one at month three.
Annual renewals should be a formality
If a customer has to be persuaded to renew, something went wrong months earlier and the discount being negotiated is not the issue.
We would rather price so that renewal is unremarkable and spend the energy on whether the product is being used — which is the leading indicator that actually predicts the renewal conversation.
Written by the Oadbox team. Something here not match how it works in your business? We would genuinely like to hear it — connect@oadbox.com.