Why per-member pricing breaks academic makerspaces

Most software in this category is priced per member, per user seat, or per tracked device. It is a familiar SaaS model and it seems fair: pay in proportion to how much you use it.

For an academic makerspace, it is the wrong shape, and the reason is not mainly about money.

The mission and the meter point in opposite directions

A university makerspace is usually funded to do two things: get as many students as possible through the door, and keep the equipment safe and working.

Per-member pricing charges you more for the first. Per-device pricing charges you more for the second.

That is not a neutral incentive. When every additional student is a line item, the rational local decision is to not create accounts for casual users — the person who comes to one open house, the student who uses the bench once, the club that meets twice a semester. When every tracked machine costs monthly, the rational decision is to track only the expensive ones.

Both decisions are individually defensible and collectively corrosive, because they mean the system is no longer a complete record. And the entire value of consolidating onto one platform was that it would be a complete record. You end up paying for a source of truth while being financially discouraged from making it true.

The arithmetic, concretely

Take a mid-size university makerspace: 500 active student accounts, 12 staff and student workers, 40 machines you would like to track and gate.

Under a typical per-member model with a per-device add-on — say a top tier at $550/month for unlimited members, plus $10 per tracked machine per month:

Platform, top tier ............ $550/mo  ×12 = $6,600/yr
Equipment, 40 machines ... 40 × $10/mo  ×12 = $4,800/yr
                                             ─────────
                                              $11,400/yr

The equipment line is 42% of the bill, and it grows every time you bring another machine under management — which is the thing you are trying to do.

Now the same shop under flat institutional pricing sized by staff seats and locations, with students unlimited and a block of devices included:

Professional plan (30 staff seats, 10 devices) .... $8,500/yr
30 additional devices × $60/yr ................... $1,800/yr
                                                   ─────────
                                                    $10,300/yr

Similar order of magnitude — but the curves diverge sharply from here. Add 300 more students and the first model’s cost depends on which tier that pushes you into; the second does not move at all. Bring 20 more machines under management and the first adds $2,400/yr while the second adds $1,200/yr.

The point is not that one number is smaller. It is which direction the bill moves when you do your job well.

Why this bites academia specifically

Three things make campus makerspaces unusually badly served by per-member pricing:

The turnover is total. A community shop’s membership grows slowly and steadily. A campus one replaces most of its user base every year, and the accounts do not disappear cleanly — a graduated student’s training record has to persist, because “was this person certified on the date of the incident” is a question that gets asked years later. So the member count only ratchets upward, even as active usage stays flat.

Casual users are the mission. The students a makerspace most wants to reach are precisely the marginal ones — the humanities major who wanders in once. Those are exactly the accounts a per-member meter discourages you from creating.

The budget is annual and fixed. Departmental budgets are set once and do not flex mid-year. A model where cost varies with headcount is not just more expensive, it is unforecastable, which is a separate and sometimes fatal problem in a procurement conversation. “It depends on enrollment” is a hard sentence to put on a purchase requisition.

What to ask a vendor

Concrete questions, on the call:

1. “What is my total annual cost at 500 members and 40 machines?” Make them do the arithmetic in front of you, including add-ons.
2. “What happens when we go from 400 to 700 students?” Listen for whether the answer is “nothing” or a tier change.
3. “Do inactive and graduated members still count?” This is the one that surprises people two years in.
4. “Is there a per-device fee, and does it apply to machines that are only tracked, not gated?”
5. “Can we get an annual fixed number for a purchase order?” If the answer involves usage-based true-ups, your procurement office is going to have opinions.

The counter-argument, fairly stated

Per-member pricing is not irrational. It aligns cost with value for a shop whose revenue is membership dues — a community makerspace charging $50/month per member has income that scales with the same number the software bills on. That is a coherent model and the alignment is real.

The mismatch is specific: it appears when the organisation’s funding is not proportional to headcount. A department budget, a grant, a facilities line — none of those grow when you serve more students. So the cost scales and the revenue does not, and the gap comes out of the program.

Which means the honest version of this argument is not “per-member pricing is bad.” It is: make sure the meter is attached to something that also pays you. For a dues-funded community shop, members qualify. For a university makerspace, they very much do not.

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MakerOps is priced by staff seats and locations, with unlimited student and patron accounts on every plan and machine access control included. Plans start at $3,000/year, quoted annually for purchase-order billing. See pricing or read about academic makerspaces.