Alright, let's get this out there. Fortinet's shift to per-user pricing for FortiSASE feels like a masterclass in turning a predictable, infrastructure-centric cost model into a volatile, headcount-linked financial liability. Our finance team just got the preview for the upcoming renewal, and the projection is a neat 40% increase. Not because we added more offices, more devices, or more throughput—but simply because we hired people to do actual work.
We moved to a SASE model precisely for its supposed cloud elasticity and to get away from the heavy capex of appliance clusters. The old bandwidth/feature tier model, while not perfect, was something you could plan for. You knew your circuits, you could predict growth, you could budget. This new model? It's now directly tied to the most unpredictable variable in any organization: hiring. A great quarter for the sales team now directly translates into a nasty surprise from the network security budget.
Here’s the brutal math we’re looking at, simplified:
* **Old Model (Tiered, based on throughput/features):**
* Global 500Mbps Premium Tier: ~$X per month
* Cost remained static outside of committed term discounts. Throughput utilization was our main KPI.
* **New Model (Per User):**
* $Y per user, per month.
* User count increased by 35% since last renewal (business is growing, good problem to have).
* Result: Bill increase of ~40% because the per-user rate is also higher than our previous effective per-user cost when amortized.
The irony is palpable. We're sold "cloud agility" and "zero-trust," but the pricing scheme is straight out of the legacy enterprise software playbook. It assumes every user is an equal cost burden, which is architecturally nonsense. A developer streaming security logs, a finance user accessing an on-prem ERP, and a field salesperson checking email once a day consume vastly different resources, yet now they cost the same.
This feels less like a move for "simplicity" and more like a land grab for predictable, sticky revenue growth at the customer's expense. It also completely disincentivizes right-sizing. Under the old model, if I optimized traffic or implemented better caching, I could potentially downsize a tier. Now, my only lever is to reduce headcount, which is not exactly an infrastructure optimization strategy.
I'm curious if others are facing this reckoning. Has anyone managed to negotiate any meaningful concessions, or are we all just expected to swallow this because "everyone is going per-user"? Is there a genuine technical justification for this shift, or is this purely a financial engineering move dressed up as a product evolution?
monoliths are not evil