The Seat Tax, Expanded

How SaaS turned “growth” into a monthly fee, and why it’s time for the site license to come back from the dead

Picture the modern onboarding ritual.

You’ve got the new hire: bright-eyed, caffeinated, still believing the hardest part of the job will be the job.

You hand them a laptop. You hand them a login. You hand them access to “the tools.”

Then you open the admin console, and you begin feeding the parking meter.

Slack seat. Workspace seat. Notion seat. Asana seat. Password manager seat. Storage seat. CRM seat. E-sign seat. Maybe Jira. Maybe GitHub. Definitely something for meetings, because humans apparently cannot just talk anymore without a licensing event.

At first it’s harmless. A few bucks here, a few bucks there. Tidy. Professional. Cost of doing business.

Then you hire your fifth person, and the line item starts eating like a teenager who just discovered DoorDash.

That’s the moment you realize per-seat SaaS pricing isn’t a business model. It’s a headcount toll.

Per-seat pricing: fair in theory, predatory in practice

Per-seat pricing makes a kind of clean, accountant-friendly sense: more users, more value, more cost.

Except most SaaS products aren’t office chairs. They’re infrastructure: the lights, locks, and plumbing of modern work. Charging per person, forever, across a dozen vendors, is like your landlord raising rent every time you hire someone with legs.

And it’s not just the money. It’s the psychology.

When every new employee triggers an automatic cascade of subscriptions, you’ve turned hiring into a recurring billing event. You’ve baked a tiny “don’t grow” voice into the operating system of every small company on Earth.

What the “normal stack” costs now

Let’s keep it boring on purpose. No exotic enterprise stuff, no “we built our own AI platform,” no bespoke compliance needs. Just a common small-business stack.

Slack Pro: $7.25/user/month (annual)Google Workspace Business Standard: $14/user/monthNotion Plus: $10/seat/monthAsana Starter: $10.99/user/month (annual)1Password Business: $7.99/user/month (annual)Dropbox Business Standard: $15/user/month

Slack Pro: $7.25/user/month (annual)

Google Workspace Business Standard: $14/user/month

Notion Plus: $10/seat/month

Asana Starter: $10.99/user/month (annual)

1Password Business: $7.99/user/month (annual)

Dropbox Business Standard: $15/user/month

That’s $65.23 per person, per month, before you’ve even sold anything.

Now scale it.

At 10 people, that’s about $652/month. Annoying, but survivable. At 30 people, that’s about $1,957/month, or $23,483/year, just to keep the business’s digital skeleton upright.

And that’s the sanitized version, the stack you’d show your accountant without embarrassment. Real businesses don’t stop there.

Add the “real business” layer: CRM + signatures

Most teams eventually standardize a CRM, and most teams eventually need signatures that don’t involve printing a PDF like it’s 2006.

Pipedrive (Lite): $14/seat/month (annual)DocuSign Standard: $25/user/month

Pipedrive (Lite): $14/seat/month (annual)

DocuSign Standard: $25/user/month

That’s another $39 per user/month.

Now your per-person stack is $104.23/month.

At 30 people, that’s about $3,127/month, or $37,523/year.

And that’s still not medium-business reality. That’s “we’re a functioning company with paperwork.”

Now the fun part: the stack multiplies by department

Here’s where annoying becomes obscene.

Engineering wants tools. Product wants tools. Marketing wants tools. Sales wants tools. Every team wants “the one app that finally fixes it,” which is always followed by “we just need everyone on it.”

A few common add-ons:

Jira Standard: $7.91/user/month (annual)GitHub Team: $4/user/monthZoom Business: ~$19.99/month per license

Jira Standard: $7.91/user/month (annual)

GitHub Team: $4/user/month

Zoom Business: ~$19.99/month per license

If you license broadly, you can easily land in the neighborhood of $136.13 per person, per month.

At 30 people, that’s roughly $4,084/month, or $49,007/year.

That’s not software as a service. That’s software as a second lease.

The hidden cost nobody brags about: license babysitting

Per-seat pricing doesn’t just drain cash. It drains attention.

At 2 to 5 people, you manage seats like you manage the office keys: casually, imperfectly, and with mild optimism.

At 20 to 30, it becomes a recurring operational chore.

Who left and is still licensed?Who needs access for two weeks, but the plan bills monthly?Who upgraded to a higher tier for one feature and never downgraded?Why are we paying for three tools that all “manage projects”?Why do contractors show up as full users?Why does every vendor have a different definition of “seat,” “member,” “guest,” “collaborator,” and “active user”?

Who left and is still licensed?

Who needs access for two weeks, but the plan bills monthly?

Who upgraded to a higher tier for one feature and never downgraded?

Why are we paying for three tools that all “manage projects”?

Why do contractors show up as full users?

Why does every vendor have a different definition of “seat,” “member,” “guest,” “collaborator,” and “active user”?

Eventually you hire someone, or burn someone out, doing what I can only describe as SaaS bouncer work. Not building product, not selling, not serving customers, just controlling the velvet rope so your subscriptions don’t breed.

This is the part no SaaS pricing page mentions, because it sounds insane when said out loud.

The thesis, stated plainly: per-seat pricing punishes hiring

It punishes growth at the moment small businesses are most fragile: when they start scaling.

You can absorb a lot as a founder. Late nights, messy processes, ugly first drafts.

What you can’t absorb forever is an economic model where every additional human being triggers a synchronized invoice chorus across a dozen vendors.

That’s how you get companies delaying hires, leaning harder on contractors, and “keeping teams lean,” which is corporate code for “we’re doing two jobs each.”

The fix: site licenses, like the way adults used to sell software

The fix isn’t radical. It’s ancient. It’s the way software used to work before SaaS companies discovered they could bill by the heartbeat.

A site license. One company. One price. Done.

Not “unlimited everything for $12 per person.” We’re not doing fantasy, we’re doing fair.

A modern site license could look like this:

Company bands, not seats: small team, medium-sized, large and so on.A flat monthly fee per band: predictable, budget-able, plan-able without a spreadsheet that looks like a NASA launch checklist.Annual true-ups, not monthly seat whiplash: hiring is lumpy, pricing shouldn’t punish the month you finally staffed up.Usage-based add-ons only where they map to real cost: storage overages, automation volume, AI compute, high API usage.Better guest and contractor logic: a two-week contractor shouldn’t cost the same as a full-time employee.

Company bands, not seats: small team, medium-sized, large and so on.

A flat monthly fee per band: predictable, budget-able, plan-able without a spreadsheet that looks like a NASA launch checklist.

Annual true-ups, not monthly seat whiplash: hiring is lumpy, pricing shouldn’t punish the month you finally staffed up.

Usage-based add-ons only where they map to real cost: storage overages, automation volume, AI compute, high API usage.

Better guest and contractor logic: a two-week contractor shouldn’t cost the same as a full-time employee.

If you’re a SaaS company reading this and feeling your pricing team tense up, relax. You still win.

Site licenses don’t kill revenue. They kill friction, churn, and the creeping suspicion that you’re charging rent for oxygen.

Also, and this is not a small point, a site license feels like partnership. Per-seat feels like punishment.

“But what about fairness?”

Fairness is not charging a growing business $48,000 a year for the privilege of coordinating humans. Fairness is pricing that tracks value without turning every new hire into a tax event.

Here’s the irony: the site license is actually aligned with how customers think.

Companies don’t buy “30 Slacks.” They buy “our internal communication system.” They don’t buy “30 Notions.” They buy “our internal operating manual.” They don’t buy “30 CRMs.” They buy “our pipeline.”

They’re buying capability, not seats.

Seats are just how the invoice is justified.

The closer: stop billing ambition by the head

Per-seat licensing started as a tidy idea and mutated into a business model that treats hiring like an in-app purchase.

The result is a quiet drag on growth, a messy admin burden, and a creeping sense that your software stack is no longer supporting the business, it’s feeding on it.

SaaS companies don’t need to get cheaper. They need to get less stupid.

Bring back the site license.

Let companies grow without hearing the cash register ring every time someone new shows up with a laptop and a pulse.

Paul Salzman writes about design, automotive engineering culture, and the standards that build enduring companies; while building a company called Wheelio.

Originally published on LinkedIn.