The status quo: agencies pay for seats they never use
Most government software is bought the way it was bought a decade ago: a fixed block of per-seat or per-user licenses, negotiated up front, paid for whether or not anyone logs in. Agencies commit to a number, the budget clears, and then the real usage curve almost never matches the purchase. Seats sit idle. Modules nobody asked for come bundled in. By renewal, the conversation is about how to justify the shelfware, not how to deliver more mission value.
Frank Slootman, then CEO of Snowflake and before that ServiceNow, named the problem plainly on the This Week In Startups podcast in March 2023. Asked why he believes consumption pricing is the most honest model, he reflected on his ServiceNow years:
The customer would often buy tons of licenses, and they wouldn’t even be using them yet. This isn’t right. This is not equitable.
Coming from the executive who scaled ServiceNow and Snowflake, that is a notable admission. We could not agree more — and for government buyers in particular, the inequity he describes is exactly the friction that slows modernization.
What Kinetic is, and why pricing follows the architecture
Kinetic Data is an enterprise workflow orchestration platform that acts as a modernization layer — software that sits on top of the systems an agency already runs, orchestrates work across them, and delivers a better experience for the people doing the work, without ripping out the systems of record underneath. You keep your existing systems. Kinetic coordinates the work that crosses them.
That architecture is why consumption pricing fits. When you are not selling a replacement system of record, you are not selling a seat for every employee who might touch it someday. You are delivering specific workflows that automate specific cross-system work. So the honest unit to charge for is the work itself — the workflows actually used — not a roster of named users guessed at during procurement.
For an agency, that distinction is the difference between a budget line that maps to delivered value and one that maps to a hopeful headcount estimate.
Why this matters more in government than anywhere else
Two things set the government buying environment apart, and both make per-seat licensing a worse fit than it already is.
Modernization without rip-and-replace
Federal and defense organizations carry decades of accumulated systems that cannot simply be turned off. The realistic path forward is incremental: modernize the experience, automate the work between systems, and leave the systems of record in place. Because Kinetic layers on top of existing systems rather than replacing them, agencies can start with one process, prove it, and expand on their own timeline.
A consumption model matches that path. You pay for the workflows you have stood up, you add more as you modernize more, and you are never carrying a license count that assumes a big-bang rollout that government budgets and risk tolerance would never approve in the first place.
Government-grade security as the baseline
Kinetic has spent more than 20 years in defense and intelligence environments and operates with a government-grade security posture — including IL5 authorization and CAC-based access. That track record is the thing competitors cannot credibly claim, and it is the reason agencies trust Kinetic to orchestrate work across sensitive systems at all. Pricing is downstream of that trust: once the platform is cleared to run the mission’s work, the fair question is how much of that work it is actually running.
The value: align cost to value, cut the bloatware
When you pay for workflows used instead of seats owned, the incentives between buyer and vendor finally point the same direction.
- Cost tracks value. Agencies pay for the cross-system work Kinetic actually orchestrates. Usage can scale up as adoption grows and scale back when a mission shifts — no stranded upfront license spend.
- No bundled bloat. When an agency asks for an application built for a specific mission, that is what gets delivered. There is no incentive to “toss in” an unrelated module that solves a problem nobody raised. Bloatware is hard to remove, confusing to users, and a distraction from the task at hand.
- Shared accountability. Both sides can see which processes drive usage and cost. That transparency turns the relationship into a joint effort to improve adoption, not an annual negotiation over unused seats.
Our Automation Maturity Model helps agencies pinpoint which processes are the best candidates to digitize first and where iteration will pay off — so usage grows because the work is genuinely getting better, not because a contract demanded it.
Where Kinetic does the actual work
To be clear about what is being consumed: it is deterministic workflow execution. Kinetic orchestrates routing, approvals, provisioning, and fulfillment across systems the same way every time — repeatable, auditable, and governed. In regulated and classified environments, that auditability is not a nice-to-have.
AI has a role in this picture, but a specific one. Build with AI. Run with Kinetic. AI can accelerate how workflows are designed, and it can participate inside a workflow as a step that classifies a request, extracts a field, recommends a route, or summarizes a case. But the execution that follows stays deterministic. AI advises, humans decide, and the workflow executes — which is precisely why charging for workflow consumption is honest. You are paying for governed work that runs reliably, not for probabilistic guesses dressed up as a system.
The honest question for procurement
Understanding the consumption dynamic is the key for procurement officers, program leaders, and budget owners across federal and defense organizations. It forces a better question than “how many seats do we need.” It forces: which processes create real value, and what does it cost to run them well?
That is a question worth asking of any vendor — and one a per-seat model is designed to avoid. As Slootman put it, the seat-heavy model is not equitable. For agencies modernizing under real budget and security constraints, the more equitable model is also the more strategic one.
If you want to see how consumption-based workflow orchestration would map to your agency’s modernization roadmap, explore our government solutions or talk with a Kinetic Data expert about the processes you would automate first.
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