I guess if you assume that "small teams" are all working 100% on the one project... which isn't even slightly reasonable (hell: that isn't even reasonable for large teams). The per-user thing essentially means you are paying costs constantly for people who just need access to something as a contributor even though they are using it once a month. It is incredibly frustrating having to be like "ugh, I contracted with someone to work on some icons for my app, but now I have to pay for them to have a 'seat' on all of our project management tooling".
One way to work through this would be to provide viewer vs collaborator user types - but ofc a viewer wouldn't be able to actually create tickets. The true goal is to build a system where everyone is productive as soon as they join, where a $5-$8 cost seems incremental, vs the work the system is able to augment for a full-time developer, business person or a contractor. This is why we're designing Tara to initially be an interface in terms of user interactions, but over time, to augment work as it happens. We've started down this path with effort predictions, sprint loads and automation of statuses.
We’ve explored ways to handle this. One of the things we’ve considered is metered billing where you only pay for the time the seat is used. It’s very similar to Github seat model but probably closer to slacks billing system.
Other explorations we did were around finer grained permissions or a collaborator vs assignee. The reason the industry itself is geared towards seats based plans in the is to drive better revenue predictability and handle cost variability between free and paid users better but we’re seeing more and more creative changes to sass billing models.
This sort of thing is pretty annoying to procure. Imagine you have 20 suppliers and they all have bespoke pricing arrangements, vs you have 20 suppliers, who each charge you X per active user per month.
Maybe you can use generic usernames like freelancer01@mycorp.com and only change the display name e.g. Jim Smith <freelancer01@mycorp.com> in January, Sarah Lee <freelancer01@mycorp.com> in February?
