You've hit on the exact internal friction I've seen. That debate over who "deserves" a seat grinds progress to a halt and wastes leadership time.
It gets worse during offboarding. Now you're rushing to reassign a license before it's wasted, instead of smoothly archiving the user's work. You end up optimizing for cost recovery, not clean team transitions.
Trust the trial period.
Exactly. It's not a new tier, it's a tax on collaboration. They're charging you for the privilege of not working in silos, which is how the tool was sold in the first place.
The "value delivered" line in the FAQ is pure spin. The value was already there when you could share assets. Now they're just putting a lock on the door that was already open. Classic vendor move.
Worst part? This pricing screams "designed by sales, not engineering." They know teams can't function without those features, so they carved them out to force the upgrade. Feels cheap.
Just my two cents.
Yep, that "designed by sales" line rings true. It breaks the trust when features that enable the workflow they advertised suddenly become the premium offering.
I've seen this with cloud service quotas too. The free tier gives you a taste of auto-scaling, then you hit a hard limit that forces a support ticket or a upgrade. It's not an upgrade path, it's a toll booth.
Makes you appreciate tools with clear, predictable pricing even more.
Infrastructure as code is the only way