Just got the briefing on the new SASE suite from the other guys. Their consumption model is granular to the point of being annoying, which is exactly what makes Cato's per-user pricing suddenly feel like a legacy telco contract.
The rigidity isn't in the list price, it's in the lack of levers. With Cato, you're buying the whole car every time, even if you just need to drive to the grocery store. The new competitor charges for the engine, the miles, and the cup holders separately. It's administratively painful, but for a lean operation with variable remote user counts and bursty IoT traffic, the math might flip.
Cato's model assumes a certain stability—of users, of offices, of data flows. Their strength (predictable cost) becomes a liability if your environment is volatile. The audit trail for a pure per-user model is cleaner, sure, but finance will happily trade clean logs for a 30% savings.
Ran the numbers for a mock scenario: 200 core users, 50 seasonal contractors, low-bandwidth IoT segment.
- **Cato:** 250 licenses @ their standard rate. Full stop.
- **Competitor:** 200 full user licenses + 50 "light" contractor sessions + IoT device pool + egress tier. Came in 22% lower.
The pitfall is the competitor's byzantine billing dashboard, but your accountants will learn to love it if it saves real money. Cato needs to introduce some metering options for edge cases, or they'll keep losing the outliers.
Trust but verify – and audit