Why we don't charge per scan

There’s a pricing model that shows up again and again in warehouse software, and it sounds reasonable for about ten seconds: pay per scan.

You scan a barcode, you pay a fraction of a cent. Light users pay little. Heavy users pay more. It feels fair — usage-based, nothing wasted.

We looked hard at that model. Then we threw it out. Here’s why.

Metered pricing taxes the behavior you want

Think about what a scan actually is.

A scan is the moment your inventory becomes true. Someone receives a pallet and scans it — now the system knows it arrived. Someone picks an order and scans each item — now the count is right and the customer gets what they ordered. Someone moves stock between locations and scans it — now you can actually find it later.

Every scan is a unit of accuracy. It’s the single most valuable action anyone on your floor can take.

So what does per-scan pricing do? It puts a meter on accuracy. It quietly tells your team: every time you make the data better, it costs the company money.

That is exactly backwards. You don’t want your staff thinking twice about whether a scan is “worth it.” You want them scanning everything, all the time, without a second thought. A pricing model that makes anyone hesitate at that moment is working against the whole point of the product.

The perverse incentive nobody admits

Here’s the part per-scan vendors don’t put on the pricing page.

If scans cost money, the cheapest way to run the software is to scan less. Skip the low-value moves. Batch things up and key them in by hand later. Don’t bother scanning the small stuff.

And the moment you do that, your inventory data degrades — which is the precise failure mode you bought the software to prevent. You’d be paying for a system and then rationing the one thing that makes it work.

A pricing model should never give your team a reason to do the job worse. Per-scan pricing does, every single day.

It also makes your bill impossible to predict. A busy season, a big customer, a new product line — suddenly your “usage” spikes and so does your invoice, in the exact month cash is tightest. Software costs should be boring. Your peak season has enough surprises.

What we charge for instead

Klovio is priced on what your business actually is, not on how hard your team works inside the app:

• The people who need access — your team and the roles they hold.
• The places you operate — the number of warehouses and locations you run.

That’s it. Scan a thousand times today and zero times tomorrow; the price doesn’t move. Onboard your whole floor; the price doesn’t punish you for it. Your bill maps to the size and shape of your operation — something you can forecast — not to a counter ticking in the background.

This means we’re genuinely fine with you scanning everything. Receiving, putaway, every pick, every transfer, every cycle count. The more your team scans, the better your data — and better data is the entire job. We’re not going to meter the thing we’re selling.

The honest version

Per-scan pricing is attractive to vendors for one reason: revenue grows automatically as the customer succeeds, with no extra work. It’s a great model — for the vendor.

For the warehouse, it introduces a small tax on accuracy and a large dose of unpredictability. We didn’t want a single person on your floor to ever pause before scanning. So we built the pricing so they never have to.

We don’t publish a rate card, because the right setup depends on your warehouses, your roles, and how you’re structured — and a 20-minute conversation gets you a real number faster than a calculator full of guesses. If you want that number, the demo below is the place to start.