Concurrent users vs named licences: why utility SaaS pricing matters

Most B2B SaaS charges per named user. You give every employee an account, the bill scales with headcount, and procurement teams audit it once a year to clean up dormant accounts.

UtilityWorkx doesn't work like that. We charge per concurrent user — the peak number of people logged in at the same time, not the total number of accounts. The reason isn't marketing differentiation. It's that utility work has a shape that named-user pricing punishes.

 

What concurrent licensing actually means

A concurrent user is a peak measurement. If your company has 60 operatives, three shift patterns, and only 20 people genuinely logged in at any one moment, you're a 20-concurrent-user company. Not a 60-user one.

Practically:

•       You can create as many named accounts as you want — operatives, supervisors, subcontractors, clients — at no per-account charge.

•       You only pay for the peak number of simultaneous authenticated sessions during the billing month.

•       We measure as the rolling 95th percentile over the month, so a single anomalous spike doesn't move your bill.

•       Your subscription is sized from the measured peak in week one of pilot — never from a guess.

 

Why named-user pricing punishes utility work

Utility contracting has employment patterns that named-user pricing wasn't designed for.

•       Seasonal crews. You scale up for major works seasons and scale down between. Named licensing means you pay for the whole roster all year, or churn accounts every spring and autumn.

•       Subcontractor turnover. A six-week subcontract brings new operatives onto the platform briefly, then they're gone. Named licensing makes every short-term resource a fight with procurement.

•       Shift patterns. A 50-person crew across two shifts has at most ~25 people logged in at once. Named licensing makes you pay double.

•       Field operatives. They log in for a few hours of evidence capture, then log out for the rest of the shift. Named licensing treats them the same as a full-time office user.

•       Client and subcontractor users. If you want to give a client read-only access to their work, named licensing puts a price tag on the privilege.

 

Every one of these patterns is normal in utility work. None of them fit the named-user model that B2B SaaS inherited from desktop software days.

 

The trade-off, honestly

Concurrent licensing has a real downside: it's harder for procurement teams to budget against. With named users, you can count chairs. With concurrent users, you need a measurement and an honest peak.

We address this in two ways:

•       The pilot period (60 days) measures your actual peak concurrency at one-minute intervals. By the time you sign a 12-month contract, the number is a measurement, not a guess.

•       Overage rates are published in the pricing guide. Brief spikes are absorbed without charge. Sustained overages trigger a quarterly review and the option to either uplift the contract or pay a published rate.

 

Procurement teams sometimes push back on concurrent licensing on principle — "this is unusual, we'd prefer per-user". Our answer is: the unusual thing is per-user licensing for a workforce that doesn't all log in at once.

 

A worked example

A mid-sized UK utility contractor:

•       80 named accounts across the company. 60 field operatives, 12 office users, 8 subcontractors.

•       Two shift patterns, with about 30 operatives active per shift, each logged in for around 90 minutes of evidence capture.

•       Peak office activity around 09:00 and 14:00 each day, with 8 office users active at peak.

•       Measured peak concurrency: 23 users at the rolling 95th percentile.

 

Under named-user pricing at £50/user/month, this company would pay £4,000/month for 80 accounts.

Under UtilityWorkx concurrent pricing at £50/user/month, this company pays £1,150/month for 23 concurrent users — under 30% of the named-user equivalent. They can create new accounts freely as operatives come and go without their bill changing.

 

The difference compounds over a 12-month contract: £45,000 saved over the year. Enough to justify the platform on cost savings alone.

 

Why we chose this model

UtilityWorkx was built by people who've spent years in UK utility contracting. We've seen seasonal scaling, shift patterns, subcontractor churn — all the realities that make per-user pricing bite.

We could have charged per named user and made more revenue per customer. We chose concurrent because it matches the cost of the software to the actual work being done — not the size of your HR list.

This is the kind of decision that earns trust over time. Customers who feel the pricing is honest stay longer, refer more, and don't fight every renewal.

If concurrent pricing makes sense for your operation — and it almost certainly does, if you're running utility work in shifts — UtilityWorkx is taking on a small number of founding customers before broader release.