Stop Counting Seats: Why Project-Value Pricing Beats Per-User Licensing
Per-user pricing seems fair until you notice what it punishes. Every councillor, coordinator, finance clerk or housing officer you want to bring into the picture adds to the monthly bill. So communities ration access, share logins, and leave the people who most need visibility staring in from outside.
That is exactly backwards for a capital portfolio. The value of a shared system grows when more of the right people can see the same accurate picture. A pricing model that charges per head turns inclusion into a line item and nudges leadership to keep the circle small to keep the cost down.
The competitive picture
Pricing models differ more than feature lists do, and they shape behaviour for years. XNM-Vision is priced on the value of the project, not the number of people who log in.
Where XNM-Vision wins
Consider the per-seat alternatives. Laserfiche typically runs $53 to $93 per user per month with 5 to 25 user minimums. OpenGov is often $50 to $200 per user per month. Microsoft 365 E5 sits around $57 to $60 per user per month — and that is before the roughly ten products you would assemble to match one platform. Every one of those grows with headcount. XNM-Vision is priced as a percentage of project value with unlimited users — a $5M project is about $55,000 in year one and roughly $22,500 a year after. Add the whole council and every coordinator at no extra per-seat cost.
What this means for your community
Project-value pricing aligns the bill with what actually matters — the scale of the work, not the size of the audience. Everyone who should see the portfolio can, the cost is predictable, and inclusion stops being something you have to budget for one login at a time.
Practical takeaways
Notice what per-seat pricing discourages. If adding a viewer costs money, you will under-share exactly the visibility a portfolio needs.
Model the bill at full adoption, not pilot size. Per-user costs that look modest for ten people scale uncomfortably across a whole administration.
Tie cost to project value. A fee that tracks the scale of the work is easier to justify and predict than one that tracks headcount.
Make access a default, not a budget line. Unlimited users means the right people are simply in, with no per-seat decision each time.
FAQ
Does unlimited users mean a higher base price?
The fee is set against project value, not seat count. A $5M project is about $55,000 in year one and roughly $22,500 a year after, whether ten people or a hundred use it.
How are new users added if there are no per-seat licences?
XNM adds users in batches at negligible cost as part of the managed service, so growing access is an operational step, not a renegotiation.
The bottom line
Per-seat licensing makes you pay for the very inclusion a portfolio system depends on. Project-value pricing with unlimited users removes that penalty — which makes XNM-Vision the better choice for any community that wants its whole team to see clearly.