The Real Cost of Per-User Software Pricing
Almost every piece of enterprise software I've ever bought or evaluated in twenty years of manufacturing has come with the same pricing model: a cost per user, per month. It sounds reasonable in a sales pitch. It becomes a genuine problem the moment you actually try to use the software properly.
Why per-user pricing quietly punishes you
Here's what happens in practice. You buy a system, and to keep costs down, you license it for the office and the shift supervisors. The leading hands don't get access. Neither do most of the operators. So the system that was supposed to give you real-time visibility across the floor ends up being used by five people, while forty others are still writing numbers on a whiteboard because giving them a login costs more money.
That's not a hypothetical. That's the default outcome of per-user pricing in a manufacturing environment, because manufacturing has a lot of people who need to touch the system briefly, a few times a shift, not a small office team logged in all day.
The maths doesn't work for manufacturing
Per-user pricing was built for software used by desk-based teams. Sales reps, marketers, finance staff, people who are logged in for eight hours a day, so the cost per user roughly matches the value they're getting.
A manufacturing floor doesn't work like that. An operator might touch the system for two minutes to log a defect, then not again for an hour. A leading hand might check a dashboard three times a shift. None of that usage pattern matches a flat monthly fee per person, but you pay the same regardless.
The result is that businesses end up rationing access to exactly the people who'd benefit most from real-time visibility, the ones actually standing at the machine.
What it costs you when access is rationed
When only a handful of people can see the system, you lose the thing that actually makes an MES valuable. Data entry gets funnelled through one or two people instead of captured at the source, which means delays and errors. Supervisors end up relaying information verbally instead of everyone checking the same live numbers. And the business ends up paying for software that's technically installed but not actually doing the job it was bought for.
I've seen plants with genuinely good software sitting mostly unused, not because the software was bad, but because the licensing model meant only a fraction of the people who needed it could log in.
What to look for instead
A flat monthly fee, regardless of headcount, means the decision to give someone access is a genuine business decision, not a cost trade-off. Want your entire floor logging quality checks in real time? You can, without doing the maths on whether it's worth the extra seats.
It also means the system scales with you properly. Hire ten more people next year, your software cost doesn't move. That's a real difference when you're trying to plan a budget twelve months out.
The bottom line
Per-user pricing isn't dishonest, it's just built for a different kind of business than yours. If you're running a manufacturing site, the value of an MES comes from everyone on the floor being able to use it, not from a handful of office logins. Pricing that punishes you for wanting that is pricing that works against the exact reason you bought the software in the first place.