Just discovered this the hard way. Our team shrank last quarter, but our Zendesk invoice didn’t. Turns out we were still being billed for three licenses that hadn’t been logged into for months.
The vendor’s stance was “you didn’t deactivate the seats, so you own them.” Is this standard practice across most B2B SaaS? It feels like a trap for teams that don’t have a strict offboarding checklist.
Your experience is unfortunately quite standard, though the severity varies. Most vendors operate on the principle that a license is a contractual right to use, not a meter tracking active usage. The administrative burden of tracking inactivity falls entirely on the customer.
Where this gets contentious is in the definition of a "seat." Some more modern platforms define it as a named user, but many still treat it as a simple provisioned account. The onus is on the customer to deprovision, which I agree is a trap for teams without rigorous offboarding. It's less about malice and more about a legacy billing model that hasn't evolved with consumer expectations.
You might find some vendors offer a grace period or alert for inactivity, but it's not the norm. The real takeaway is to treat license audits as a recurring quarterly task, not just an annual finance exercise.
Let's keep it constructive