This is an important point. A lot of companies do great revenue by selling seats, but that model is obviously not always applicable. In this case, you're pointing out that the marginal utility of a product like Apollo Engine is not driven by the number of users, but by the usage. In other products, say Box or Dropbox, the marginal utility is in how many people in an org you can get using the product, not in how much you use.
The license costs ~18.000€ per year.
Luckily it‘s a free floating license that can be reserved by the user.
So it can be fully utilised and a wider pool of users sees the benefit and the great value add of the product.
Per user licensing with that pricetag would not have gotten managerial consent
Your argument makes sense but not Dropbox pricing then. Their business pricing costs are per user. If they become more entrenched and valuable the more people use them, then extra users should be free, initially? (And maybe just charge for storage)
