The Hidden Cost of Concurrent-User VPN Licensing
Most enterprise VPN vendors charge by the concurrent connection — not by the number of employees who use VPN. It sounds reasonable until you model the real-world cost for a hybrid team. The math is not flattering.
How Concurrent Licensing Works
With concurrent-user pricing, you pay for a pool of "connection slots." If you buy 40 concurrent connections, at most 40 employees can be connected at any moment. If a 41st tries to connect, they're denied until someone disconnects.
To avoid denying access, IT teams buy enough headroom to handle peak usage — which is almost always significantly above average usage.
The Peak Problem
Research on hybrid work patterns consistently shows that between 30% and 40% of remote-eligible employees are online and using VPN at any given peak hour — typically mid-morning on Tuesday through Thursday.
For a 100-person company with 80 VPN-eligible employees, peak concurrent connections run around 32 users (40%). But since you can't run at 100% capacity without risk of denials, IT typically buys 20–30% headroom: so 40 connections purchased.
At $7/concurrent/month (a typical mid-market rate), 40 connections = $3,360/year. Every employee added to the VPN-eligible pool requires buying more capacity — even if most of those employees are never simultaneously online.
The Full Cost Breakdown
Let's model three team sizes with OpenVPN's published pricing as the benchmark:
| Team Size | Peak Concurrent (40%) | Purchased (125%) | Annual Cost (OpenVPN) | Annual Cost (Remok) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 users | 20 connections | 25 connections | $2,100 | $588 |
| 100 users | 40 connections | 50 connections | $4,200 | $1,100 |
| 300 users | 120 connections | 150 connections | $11,970 | $3,300 |
Remok pricing: $12/user/year (2–99 users), $11/user/year (100–499 users). OpenVPN pricing based on published rates as of 2026. Actual results may vary.
The Capacity Anxiety Tax
There's a second, less visible cost: the operational overhead of managing capacity. IT teams running concurrent-license VPNs regularly deal with:
- Users being denied access during peak hours ("the VPN is full")
- Support tickets when employees can't connect
- Quarterly capacity reviews to decide whether to buy more licenses
- Emergency license purchases when a project requires more simultaneous connections
None of this happens with per-seat pricing. If someone is a registered user, they can connect. There is no "pool" to exhaust.
A Better Pricing Model
Per-user (per-seat) annual pricing aligns vendor incentives with customer outcomes. You pay based on your headcount, not on how aggressively your team uses VPN. Growth in usage doesn't mean surprise capacity purchases.
Remok uses per-seat annual pricing with volume tiers:
- 2–99 users: $12/user/year
- 100–499 users: $11/user/year
- 500–1000 users: $10/user/year
- No concurrent connection limits — ever
The Total Cost of Ownership
Beyond the license cost, factor in:
- Server cost: a modest $20–40/month VPS can handle 50–100 concurrent VPN users
- Time to deploy: ~2 hours initial setup, ~30 min/month ongoing for self-hosted solutions
- No per-connection anxiety: zero support tickets for "VPN is full"
- Data ownership: all logs and traffic stay on your servers
For a 100-person company, the all-in annual cost of a self-hosted Remok deployment (server + license) is typically under $1,500 — compared to $4,000–6,000 for comparable cloud VPN services.