- Per-user pricing assumes participants and administrators are the same people. On a shop floor they are not, and the ratio is often twenty to one.
- The result is a rollout that covers supervisors and stops, leaving the actual work on paper.
- Charging per site removes the arithmetic entirely: users and participants are free, however many there are.
At a typical seat price, covering everyone who touches a daily check costs more than the problem. So the buyer covers the supervisors instead, the operators stay on paper, and the system records a fraction of what actually happens.
Where seat pricing came from
Most workflow tools were built for teams where everyone has a laptop, an email address and a reason to open the software daily. In that world one seat per person is fair, because every person is both a participant and a user.
Frontline operations break that assumption. The person doing the check opens the software for ninety seconds a day, or once a week, or once when a contractor turns up. They are a participant, not a user, and pricing them as a user makes the maths fail.
What teams do when the maths fails
- They buy fewer seats. Supervisors get accounts; operators keep the clipboard. The system now records supervision, not work.
- They share a login. One tablet, one account, no attribution. This is the outcome most likely to fail an audit.
- They stop the rollout at one site. The pilot works, the multiplication does not, and it never reaches the other four plants.
- They stay on paper. The most common outcome, and the reason the register is still on the wall.
A different split: who logs in, versus who does the work
The useful line is not headcount, it is who needs to see across the work. Managers, supervisors and admins need dashboards, history and the ability to change a process. Everyone else needs to receive one task and complete it.
Price the first group and let the second group be unlimited, and the rollout arithmetic disappears. A 200-person site costs the same as a 20-person one, because the number of people who need to log in barely changes.
What this looks like in practice
On every RakuOps plan, including Free, users are unlimited and you choose only how many sites you run. Operators, technicians, cleaners, drivers, contractors and vendors who complete tasks from a link are never counted and never charged, however many of them there are. Starter is $99 a month for up to three sites; Growth is $499 for up to ten; Pro is $799 with no limit.
The practical effect is that you can put a check in front of everyone who does the work on day one, rather than covering the few people you could afford to licence.