Primo Round ExpressWhy paying per head costs more than you think
Per-user pricing looks transparent, but it hides a mechanism: the bill grows with people, not with the value you receive.
The per-user bill
- 50 users = 50 licenses
- Grows with headcount
- Ghost licenses
The per-seat math
Picture a service at, say, $12 per user per month (purely illustrative). With 50 enabled people that's $7,200 a year. With 120 people it's over $17,000. Yet the number of files sent can be identical: you paid for headcount, not usage.
Most of those users send an attachment now and then. You're buying capacity you don't use, multiplied by every company badge.
The costs nobody puts in the quote
- Automatic growth: every hire is one more license, even if they'll send few files.
- Ghost licenses: accounts of people who changed roles or left, often still active and paid.
- “Just-in-case” overprovisioning: buying more seats than needed to avoid running short.
- Admin overhead: someone has to assign, revoke and report on seats.
Usage-based pricing removes the head tax
With Express you pay an annual product license and the real consumption of the infrastructure, not people. Sending a file doesn't require a per-user license: whoever needs to send a document sends it. No seats to count, no accounts to deactivate, no overprovisioning.
Per-seat optimises predictability for the vendor. Usage optimises the alignment between spend and value for you.
See how it works in detail on the usage-based pricing page, and why it pairs with data control.
FAQ
Is usage-based always cheaper than per-user?
Almost always when usage is distributed and variable, as in file transfer. An estimate on your real volumes verifies it case by case.
How do I avoid “ghost licenses”?
With usage-based pricing the problem disappears: there are no seats to assign or revoke, so no inactive account keeps weighing on the budget.
Is usage-based cost predictable?
Yes, reasonably: file-transfer bandwidth is estimated from historical volumes. It varies with spikes, but without the structural growth tied to headcount.