In the example you brought up, I'd try to meter (and value-price) the output, not on the collection. You have to make sure that your margins on the output of the service covers the cost of passively collecting and storing the data.
Per-seat pricing can be value-based as well. "value based pricing" in the context of a per-seat license is about identifying the value of the 'seat' to the user, rather than calculating the pricing based on your own costs plus some projected profit margin.
Regarding seats and SSO, check out https://sso.tax. Many companies will have a seat based license that has a free tier and as soon as you need/want SSO (because you see the value) you're now cast into a very expensive pricing model. Personally I hate being on the receiving end of this, but they're using the free feature-set as a demand driver, and as soon as you want to rely on the service in an authenticated master, they've now got you locked in.
I see the assumption of SSO/MFA as defeating the SSO tax: If we assume SSO/MFA, there is no base price vs premium tier price distinction wrt SSO -- all customers get it. For free auth modes (SSO, but probably not MFA due to SMS costs?), esp. b2b, it's easy to extend into free not-a-customer tiers. As SSO in turn eliminates account sharing, everyone wins: all users get more security, and providers see less account abuse/sharing (and hacks). And hopefully, there's something more valuable & enterprise-aligned to charge for wrt security than everyone-grade-SSO, e.g., audit logs, AD, & training.
RE:Output, I like that view -
* Passive (data ingest, ...): bad; and data gravity & analytics value + dropping storage prices means you want to encourage collection vs discourage (up to data liability hazards)
* Active usage based, esp. user-visible: You're using CPU/GPU hours to run something. Except agreed, the further you are from a dev, the more annoyed they are. An active user can be a proxy for this ("Editor", "Viewer", "Creator", ...), but users make it hard to get more scalable pricing, e.g., 1 power user should be able to get insane value, and be charged proportionally.
* Output: If the result of a task is an artifact, like a project/model/etc., it's a proxy for unit of value achieved. In a sense, Slack's "Free tier conversion to get search history of recent chats" comes from recognizing this.
I find it interesting companies like Figma are by User, not Project...
Per-seat pricing can be value-based as well. "value based pricing" in the context of a per-seat license is about identifying the value of the 'seat' to the user, rather than calculating the pricing based on your own costs plus some projected profit margin.
Regarding seats and SSO, check out https://sso.tax. Many companies will have a seat based license that has a free tier and as soon as you need/want SSO (because you see the value) you're now cast into a very expensive pricing model. Personally I hate being on the receiving end of this, but they're using the free feature-set as a demand driver, and as soon as you want to rely on the service in an authenticated master, they've now got you locked in.