Enshittified subscription costs

We’re growing, and that’s expensive. When we were five people, we signed up for a handful of tools that charge by the seat, the kind a growing company can’t do without, like Notion and Slack. Now that we’re hiring, every new person adds another line to a bill that was already climbing, and the plan we started on has become the wrong one. The features we’ve come to need sit a tier or two up, past a lot of things we’ll never touch.

A logical way to charge

I understand the logic, because I sell software too. Per-seat pricing is simple to explain and scales with the customer, which is the sneaky part. Your costs go up as you hire. The features most likely to hide behind a higher tier are the ones a growing company can’t do without. Single sign-on is the obvious example, and charging extra for it is so common that it has a name: the SSO tax.

A milder kind of enshittification

Cory Doctorow has a word for the way products get worse for the people who rely on them: enshittification. His book of that name traces how platforms start out good to you, then squeeze you once you’re locked in and leaving would cost too much. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it. It’s the clearest account I’ve found of why so much of the internet feels worse than it used to. Per-seat pricing is a milder version of the same drift. Nobody’s wrecking the product. They’re charging more as you come to rely on it, right when leaving would mean retraining a whole team.

Is there another way?

I don’t think the vendors are villains, and I’m not sure I’d price it differently in their position. Still, I wonder about the alternatives, like charging for what a company uses rather than how many people can log in, or letting basic security come with every plan instead of the expensive one. None of that would be charity. A company that priced this way would earn a lot of loyalty from the businesses everyone else has decided to overcharge.

I don’t have a neat answer. I only know that a tool meant to help a company grow shouldn’t turn into a bigger cost the moment it starts to.