Enterprise marketing departments now face a significant financial and architectural challenge: companies routinely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on software access before launching campaigns or engaging leads.
Software engineers and technical leaders are raising concerns.
According to an article in the Norwegian technology magazine Kode24, Pål Lind, founder of Inzynk, has criticised the conventional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) per-seat model, calling it an unsustainable “SaaS tax” that hits the marketing technology (MarTech) and AdTech sectors harder than most others.
Lind notes that enterprise marketing departments now allocate large parts of their operating budgets to software licensing fees. This significant overhead is incurred simply to maintain active logins, well before any API calls, audience synchronisation, or campaign data transmission occurs.
Lind asks, “When did we begin building digitised tollbooths rather than generating value based on usage, not logins?”
The Seat-License Trap in Modern Marketing
Over the past decade, enterprise MarTech platforms have based their revenue models on user count, from customer data suites to marketing automation hubs. While per-user pricing may appear straightforward, it often exceeds both budget constraints and system performance limits.
Marketing requires collaboration among data analysts, media planners, CRM specialists, performance marketers, and external agencies. However, the per-seat model imposes high recurring fees even when specialists or agency partners need only occasional access to analytics dashboards.
To control rising SaaS costs, CMOs and procurement teams restrict licenses. This exclusion prevents marketers from accessing necessary data, creating silos that undermine integrated marketing efforts. On top of that, engineering teams often build temporary solutions instead of paying enterprise rates for occasional users. To bypass commercial barriers, engineers spend valuable time building custom workflows, sharing credentials, or creating shadow dashboards.
This then leads to chronic UI bloat as MarTech vendors add unnecessary features to justify costly annual renewals for limited seats. Instead of agile data-processing tools, marketers get cumbersome systems that engineers dislike integrating.
Detached from Technical Reality
The main flaw of the per-seat model in MarTech is its disregard for modern cloud architecture.
Marketing data operations are inherently bursty, relying on real-time event streaming, serverless transformations, automated webhooks, and elastic cloud scaling. Computing costs spike during major events, then drop.
Charging users high per-head fees is disconnected from actual server usage, API queries, or bandwidth. This practice persists because of vendor sales strategies, at the expense of technical efficiency.
Consumer technology eliminated access fees years ago; customers no longer pay to view products online. However, B2B MarTech remains one of the few tech sectors that charges fees before delivering any services.
Moving to Utility-Based, Zero-Base Architecture
Lind suggests that engineers and business leaders should rebuild MarTech around consumption and actual data throughput, like infrastructure providers such as AWS or Cloudflare. Under this pricing approach, businesses avoid fixed platform charges and incur expenses according to their actual use of data, processing resources, and media services. Marketing teams are billed for completed activities rather than unused accounts, reflecting a broader shift toward consumption-based models that is also becoming evident in HubSpot.
Enterprise marketing leaders and systems architects should now advocate for software that charges only for the tangible utility it delivers, removing unnecessary digital barriers.
