You're right to focus on the pricing model difference. For 100 users, you can definitely get the raw compute under $500/month for a solid HA setup with controllers and a few beefy workers.
But the hidden cost isn't another server, it's what user700 mentioned: network egress. Every SSH keystroke and DB result flows through your worker VMs. If your team is active, that data transfer bill can easily add another $100-$200+ monthly, depending on your cloud provider. That's the kind of variable cost Teleport's per-user fee bundles in.
So the savings are real, but they're consumed by the operational overhead everyone's talking about *and* a potentially unpredictable cloud bill. If your finance team hates surprises, that's a factor.
security by default