- Per-seat pricing does not just cost money, it changes behaviour: teams share logins, licence only supervisors, and stall rollouts at one site.
- Each of those workarounds has a cost, and the largest is a record that cannot name who did the work.
- Charging only for administrators removes the incentive to work around the licence count.
Shared devices are almost always a response to seat pricing. The saving is visible on the invoice; the cost appears the first time somebody asks which of eleven people took the reading.
1. Shared logins, and the records they ruin
When each licence costs money, sites buy one tablet and share an account. Every record on it is attributable to a device rather than a person, which is the first weakness an auditor probes and the hardest to fix retrospectively.
2. Partial rollouts that record supervision, not work
Licence the supervisors and the operators stay on paper. The system then contains a record of who checked the checks, and nothing about the checks themselves. This is common and rarely acknowledged in the business case.
3. The expansion tax
A pilot at one site is affordable. Multiplying it by six is where the project dies, usually a year in, after the process work has already been done. The cost is not just money, it is the credibility of the next proposal.
4. Licence administration
Somebody must add joiners, remove leavers and reclaim seats from agency staff who worked two shifts. On a workforce that turns over, this is a permanent small tax on somebody's week, and when it slips you pay for licences nobody uses.
5. The processes that never get digitised
The quietest cost. Because each new process means more participants and more seats, teams digitise only the highest-value one and leave the rest on paper. The tool becomes a point solution instead of the way work runs.
What removes the incentive
If participants are free, none of these five behaviours has a reason to exist. Nobody shares a login to save money, rollouts do not stop at supervisors, expansion costs nothing extra per head, licence admin covers a handful of managers, and adding a second or tenth process is free. That is the model RakuOps uses: pay for people who log in, everyone completing tasks is unlimited.