The licence conversation
is really an access decision

Per-seat pricing is defensible and easy to understand. Its real effect is not on the invoice, it is on the annual meeting where somebody has to decide which people stop seeing numbers.

The renewal conversation

It arrives every year. The licence count has grown with headcount, the total is now large enough to need justifying, and somebody sensible asks who is actually using these.

Usage reports come back showing a long tail of people who log in monthly rather than daily. Those licences get cut, because they are the easiest thing to cut and the saving is immediate and provable.

Who gets cut, and why it is the wrong group

The daily user is an analyst who would find the number another way regardless. The monthly user is often a store manager, a site supervisor, a regional lead: somebody operational who looks at one number, acts on it, and goes back to their actual job.

That person's marginal value from access is high and their usage is low, which is exactly the profile the cost-cutting exercise selects against. The platform ends up serving the people who need it least.

What changes when readers are not metered

The question stops being who deserves a licence and becomes who would benefit from seeing this. Those are different conversations with different answers, and only one of them is about the data.

It also changes what gets built. When adding fifty readers is free, a report aimed at the operational edge of the business is worth making. When it costs, that report needs a business case, and it usually does not get one.

The honest counterpoint

If your reporting genuinely serves a small analytical team and always will, per-seat is fine and probably cheaper. The model only turns against you when reporting stops being for a small team, and most businesses discover that transition after they have committed to the pricing.