Recently, the Icenews team came across an interesting article in the Norwegian Kode24 about outdated subscription licensing when it comes to seat-based software, in this case, MarTech & AdTech.
Pål Lind, co-founder of the Norwegian-Swedish B2B orchestration platform Inzynk, wrote the article. In his op-ed, “SaaS-lisenser ødelegger moderne utvikling” (SaaS Licenses Are Destroying Modern Development), Lind targets enterprise software’s standard per-seat subscription.
“When did we start building digitised tollbooths instead of creating real value?” Lind writes in kode24, noting that marketing teams routinely surrender up to 20 per cent of their budgets to software access fees before transferring a single byte of data.
Lind highlights three core technical flaws in per-seat pricing:
- Stifled Adoption: Rationed logins force engineers to build brittle workarounds and share credentials to bypass licensing caps.
- UI Bloat: Vendors pile on half-baked modules to justify monthly seat costs, turning lean web apps into sluggish monoliths.
- Decoupled Costs: In an era of serverless compute, flat per-head fees bear no operational relationship to actual cloud resource consumption.
Inzynk is putting this critique into practice across Norway and Sweden by eliminating platform and seat fees entirely. Operating like cloud utility providers AWS or Cloudflare, the platform offers unrestricted seats and bills strictly on metered media throughput delivered to verified target accounts.
By eliminating gatekeeping code, Lind argues that software can finally focus on open APIs, leaner codebases, and real delivered value over passive access fees.
The picture is of Pål Lind during his visit to HubSput