Two years ago, during an otherwise ordinary quarterly review, our head of customer success pulled up an account screen that made the room go silent.
One of our enterprise clients—a fast-growing logistics company with over 300 employees—had exactly three paid seats on our platform. Those three seats, however, were running nearly round-the-clock automations, pinging our database hundreds of thousands of times a day, and driving about $40,000 in monthly operational value for their business.
They were paying us $147 a month.
When we looked closer, the reality was even more humiliating: the team had created a shared calendar invite containing the master login credentials. Whenever someone needed to pull a report or run a workflow, they all logged into the same master admin account.
We were furious at first. We talked about implementing IP restrictions, forcing single sign-on (SSO) locks, and adding device limits to stop password sharing. But as the frustration settled, an uncomfortable truth emerged: our customers weren’t acting maliciously. They were simply responding rationally to a broken economic model.
