What is Per-active-user pricing?
Per-active-user pricing charges a published rate for each person who used the product in the billing period, usually a month, instead of a fixed number of seats or registered accounts. Inactive accounts cost nothing. It aligns the bill with real use and makes it cheaper to give access to occasional learners, partners and seasonal staff.
How Personal Academy handles it
Personal Academy charges one published price per active user per month, where active means signing in that month on any channel, with no minimum bill, no setup fee and volume bands from the price list.
A worked example
Suppose a 300-person hotel group gives every employee, including seasonal staff, an account on its learning platform. In the off season, only permanent staff sign in, so the monthly count is lower. In the summer, seasonal staff complete their onboarding and the count rises for those months. The group budgets on the expected pattern instead of paying for every account all year.
Seat-based licensing asks the buyer to predict how many people will need access and commit to that number, often for a year. Underestimate and you pay for overages or block new users; overestimate and you pay for unused seats. Per-active-user pricing replaces the forecast with a monthly count of real use.
The model has three parts. The first is a definition of an active user, which should be simple and visible, for example a person who signed in at least once in the month. The second is the rate, published so that any buyer can calculate cost without a sales call. The third is how volume is treated: many vendors apply graduated discounts above certain counts, so larger organisations pay less per person on the higher bands.
Buyers should also look at what sits outside the per-user rate. Setup fees, minimum annual commitments, separate administrator or author licences, charges for single sign-on and usage charges for AI or messaging all change the true cost. A per-user price that excludes most of these can be more expensive than it first looks.
For organisations with uneven training activity, such as retailers, hospitality groups, healthcare providers and companies with large contractor populations, per-active-user pricing usually lowers cost and removes the pressure to ration accounts.
For finance teams, the main change is variability. Monthly invoices follow activity, so a forecast based on training calendars is useful, and the platform should show the running count during the month. Comparing quotes on twelve months of realistic activity, rather than a single month, gives the fairest picture.