The Per-User Pricing Trap
For two decades the default SaaS pricing model has been per user per month. The math is simple and the salesperson's quote is easy to write. The problem is that for most workflows, a user count is a terrible proxy for the value the software delivers.
Consider visitor management at a 500-employee company. The receptionist who actually checks in two hundred visitors a week is one user. The four hundred employees who never touch the system but happen to have accounts because IT provisions everyone the same way are four hundred more. Pay per seat and you are paying mostly for ghosts.
Consider AI meeting note takers at the same company. The executive assistant who reviews every transcript twice a day, the engineer who skims their own meeting once a month, and the auditor who pulls a record once a quarter all count as users. Pay per seat and the auditor's twice-a-year glance costs as much as the assistant's daily workflow.
Per-user pricing also creates a perverse incentive: lock users out to keep the bill down. The actual person who needs to find a decision they made in a meeting last March cannot, because they were never given a seat, because nobody wanted to pay for the seat they did not yet know they needed.
A Better Question: What Does The System Actually Do?
For Kahrbon, the work the system does is measurable in two units:
- Visitors processed. A check-in, a pre-registered arrival, an NDA signature — each is a unit of front-desk work the platform performed.
- Meetings transcribed. Hours of meeting audio captured, attributed, and turned into searchable transcripts, decisions, and action items.
Both numbers are observable, predictable, and tied to value delivery. A facility that hosts a thousand visitors a month is doing more work than one that hosts ten. A team that runs forty hours of meetings a week through AI note takers is generating more output than one that runs four. Pricing on those numbers means the bill scales with the work, not the org chart.
What Tiered Usage Pricing Looks Like in Practice
A tiered usage model has three pieces:
- A fair starting tier. A small organization paying a small price for a meaningful but bounded amount of monthly usage. Not a free tier with everything stripped out — a real working tier.
- Predictable tier jumps. Cross a threshold and you move to the next tier, where the per-unit price is lower than the previous one. There are no surprise overage line items; you know in advance what the next tier costs.
- Everyone in the directory has access. Sign up the four-hundred-person company, and all four hundred have accounts. Use the platform with two of them and you pay tier one. Add an offsite event that doubles your visitor traffic for a month, and the bill reflects that month — not a permanent seat-count revision.
Why This Works Better for Customers
Procurement is calmer. Forecasting next year's bill is straightforward: project your visitor traffic and your meeting volume, multiply by the tier rate, and you have a number. There is no rate-card spreadsheet with seven license types.
Adoption is not penalized. Inviting the assistant who only needs the platform twice a quarter does not change the bill. So she gets invited. So she finds the meeting recording she needed. So the platform earns its keep.
Outliers do not warp the contract. A quarter with an unusually busy lobby is reflected in that quarter's invoice. A quiet quarter pays less. The bill is a faithful record of the work performed, not a 12-month bet placed at renewal.
Why This Works Better for Us
Vendor honesty: a pricing model only survives if both sides come out ahead. Usage-based pricing aligns Kahrbon's incentives with our customers' actual outcomes. We make more when the system is used more — when more visitors are processed efficiently, when more meetings turn into trackable decisions. If a customer's usage drops, they pay less and we pay closer attention to why. If their usage doubles, the platform was clearly earning its keep, and the contract scales without a renegotiation.
What This Means For You
If you have been quietly auditing your SaaS spend and asking the question "are we paying for hundreds of users who never log in," you already know the answer. The fix is to move to a pricing model that bills for the workflow, not the directory.
That is the model Kahrbon is built on. Talk to us about your visitor volume and your meeting hours; we will quote a tier. No per-user math required.
Kahrbon Team
Product
Expert insights on visitor management, physical security, and workplace safety from the Kahrbon team.