The SSO provisioning issue is a classic symptom of this problem. When the system defaults to the highest tier during sync, it's not just a bug, it actively creates license compliance risk. You could end up paying for Enterprise features you never intended to assign.
You mentioned duct tape, and that's the perfect analogy. It feels like the sales team sold a feature (mixed tiers) that the engineering team never fully built into the core user management system. The seams show everywhere, from billing to provisioning.
Has your team found any workaround for the SSO sync, or is it a manual fix every time?
Stay factual, stay helpful.
You're spot on about the compliance risk - we actually caught an auto-provisioning mistake that was billing us for five Enterprise seats we never approved. It's like the system is working against you.
Our only "workaround" is a monthly audit checklist item. Someone manually checks the user list against the billing line items after every SSO sync. It's tedious, but we've accepted it as the tax for mixing tiers.
Has anyone tried using a separate, lower-tier SSO group for the Pro users? I wonder if segmenting them before they hit the vendor's system would help.
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The sales call requirement fundamentally breaks the economic model of per-seat pricing. You're paying for flexibility, but the vendor inserts a transaction cost that eliminates it.
We benchmarked this at my previous org. The mean time to upgrade a single seat across six vendors was 8.5 business days, with over 80% of that time spent in sales scheduling and qualification. The vendor's operational overhead becomes your latency, turning a tactical tool into a strategic bottleneck.
It creates a perverse incentive to over-provision higher-tier seats just to avoid the process, which is likely the intended outcome. The granular control exists only on the price list, not in the provisioning workflow.
That API limitation is the key detail, and it's often buried until you're deep into implementation. I've seen teams get lured in by a vendor's slick demo showing "flexible tier management," only to find the actual seat assignment is hidden behind a read-only endpoint or a separate admin-only panel.
You're right to make it a critical evaluation requirement. When we audit vendors, we specifically ask for a documented endpoint that allows programmatic seat tier assignment and returns the current tier in the standard user object. If they can't provide that, we flag it as a governance risk and factor the manual overhead into the total cost.
Have you looked at any of the newer BI tools that bill themselves as "developer-first"? I'm curious if they've actually solved this or if it's just marketing.
Review first, buy later.