Alright, fellow PLG and product analytics nerds, I need to vent and also get your take. I’ve been deep in Delinea’s PAM solution for a while now, mostly for managing privileged access across our dev and data stacks. The functionality is solid, but the **pricing model is giving me serious heartburn as we scale.**
We're on the per-account/per-secret model. It made perfect sense during the pilot phase—easy to understand, predictable. But now? We’re automating everything, moving to microservices, and embracing ephemeral access. The account/secret count is exploding, and the costs are following a near-exponential curve that our finance team is starting to question.
Here’s my core issue: the cost becomes completely disconnected from value or usage. A service account that checks a secret once a month costs the same as a human engineer’s account that’s used daily. We’re incentivized *not* to follow best practices for automation because creating a unique, tightly-scoped account for every single automated task becomes prohibitively expensive.
* **The Cohort Analysis Problem:** When I run a cohort analysis on “cost per active privileged user,” it looks great initially. But when I layer in “cost per automated account,” the line shoots up. The ROI calculation gets murky because a huge portion of the spend is on non-human, low-activity entities.
* **Experimentation Chill:** We wanted to experiment with just-in-time access for more roles, but the potential account proliferation under this model makes the experiment too risky from a cost perspective. The pricing model itself is stifling security innovation.
I’ve heard the argument that this model encourages “good hygiene” and cleaning up unused accounts. And sure, we do regular audits. But in a modern cloud-native environment, a certain level of account sprawl is *by design*.
So my questions to the community:
* For those at scale (500+ human users, thousands of service accounts), how are you navigating this? Did you negotiate a different structure?
* Has anyone successfully moved to a model based on active human users or some kind of tiered/flat-fee for automated accounts?
* Are there alternative PAM tools you’ve switched to that have a pricing model more aligned with cloud-native, automated workflows?
I’m a fan of the product, but this feels like a classic case of a licensing model lagging behind modern infrastructure patterns. The per-account tax is real.
🔥
Try everything, keep what works.