Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The current "per-seat" billing model for on-premises enterprise deployments presents financial and administrative challenges for large organizations. Currently, licenses are billed for every provisioned user, regardless of their actual usage.
In large organizations—particularly non-profits, educational institutions, or enterprises with massive identity providers (SSO/LDAP)—it is standard practice to sync all users (e.g., 100k+ accounts) so that access is available when needed. However, only a small percentage of these users may require the tool regularly. Paying for inactive accounts increases the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and can prevent large-scale adoption due to budget constraints.
Describe the solution you'd like
We would like to propose a Monthly Active User (MAU) billing model for on-premises enterprise customers.
The requested functionality includes:
- Active User Definition: A user is only counted as "active" if they log in or perform a key action within a given 30-day billing cycle.
- Usage-Based Billing: If a provisioned user does not access the platform during the billing cycle, they are not counted towards the billable seat total for that month.
- License Reporting: Similar to other enterprise on-prem products (such as coder.com), the instance would securely report the monthly active user count to a licensing server, or allow for a periodic usage-report export for billing true-ups.
This model aligns the cost of the software directly with the actual value and adoption rate within the company.
Describe alternatives you've considered
- Manual De-provisioning scripts: Writing custom automation to monitor user activity, deactivate inactive accounts, and reactivate them upon request.
- Drawbacks: This introduces significant administrative overhead, increases the risk of data association issues, and creates friction for users who find their accounts deactivated when they occasionally need access.
- Restricting SSO access to specific departments: Only provisioning access to a subset of employees.
- Drawbacks: This creates artificial silos and administrative bottlenecks when users outside of the pre-approved groups require temporary or sudden access to the tool.
Additional context
Many modern enterprise and developer tools designed for on-premises deployment (such as Coder, Slack, and various Git providers) utilize active-user billing. For large-scale organizations and non-profits, this pricing flexibility is often a key requirement during the procurement and evaluation process.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The current "per-seat" billing model for on-premises enterprise deployments presents financial and administrative challenges for large organizations. Currently, licenses are billed for every provisioned user, regardless of their actual usage.
In large organizations—particularly non-profits, educational institutions, or enterprises with massive identity providers (SSO/LDAP)—it is standard practice to sync all users (e.g., 100k+ accounts) so that access is available when needed. However, only a small percentage of these users may require the tool regularly. Paying for inactive accounts increases the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and can prevent large-scale adoption due to budget constraints.
Describe the solution you'd like
We would like to propose a Monthly Active User (MAU) billing model for on-premises enterprise customers.
The requested functionality includes:
This model aligns the cost of the software directly with the actual value and adoption rate within the company.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Additional context
Many modern enterprise and developer tools designed for on-premises deployment (such as Coder, Slack, and various Git providers) utilize active-user billing. For large-scale organizations and non-profits, this pricing flexibility is often a key requirement during the procurement and evaluation process.