A "service account" is a privileged account that humans or other machines can access an application without using any monetizable features.<p>In SaaS, it is an admin user, or an account that runs integration jobs, etc.<p>When you are two founders and a dog--you do not care about service accounts, but when you are a team of 30, a dedicated user in IT or Finance needs access to onboard and offboard users.<p>Majority of the SaaS companies do not provide this feature--and it costs a paid user seat or two to perform routine admin tasks. Hurts in this economy to even have a single SaaS seat unused.<p>Why is this not done?<p>Isn't this simple to implement: A (set of) feature flag(s) that does not allow the user to do anything useful except add/delete users is all that's needed.
If you’ve got 30 seats, another 1 seat is not much more.<p>I mean, enterprise users are used to paying 5x as much to use SSO, look at the pricing per seat of Salesforce.com which goes into the stratosphere when you add enterprise features because really $200 a seat is cheap to get a salesperson putting all his records where everyone in the company can see them.
I think that SaaS products just disagree with your conclusion. Service accounts which are accounts that provide value and provide that value to your bigger and more complicated customers, should cost money. The smallest and most price sensitive clients, don't need them and thus aren't impacted by paying for them.