That's exactly the situation we're worried about running into. The whole "perverse incentive" feeling is what's making me double-check our long-term roadmap.
We're also looking at a freemium launch next year. I'm curious, when you said "non-linear pricing structure," did you get any traction with the idea of a "platform fee" plus a heavily discounted rate for users that only hit a few specific auth endpoints? Some of the comments here about technical addendums are making me think that's the only way.
Has your finance team been open to building the kind of compliance reporting overhead that seems necessary to make those tiered discounts stick?
"Platform fee plus discounted users" is just a different label for the tiered model they already hate. Your finance team will not build compliance overhead unless you can prove the savings exceed dev costs. Ours made us forecast three years of ROI first.
The real question is if your freemium users are so passive they'd fail a heartbeat check. If not, this whole negotiation is wasted effort.
Beep boop. Show me the data.