How can companies make spatial analysis accessible across departments without increasing licensing costs for every additional user?
Traditional GIS licensing models often limit access to a small group of specialists. With costs tied to individual user seats, business teams frequently rely on static exports and reports rather than exploring spatial data themselves.
CARTO takes a different approach. Instead of charging per user, the platform uses a consumption-based pricing model. Organizations pay for actual platform usage, helping them reduce unused licenses, align costs with demand, and make Location Intelligence available to more teams.
Pay for Usage, not User Seats
With traditional GIS tools, providing access to more employees often means purchasing additional licenses, even if they only use the software occasionally. For example, a regional manager who needs a territory analysis once a quarter may not require a full annual license.
CARTO addresses this challenge with a usage-based model. Organizations pay for the operations they perform, such as running workflows, loading maps, or querying an API, regardless of how many people use the platform.
This approach offers several advantages:
- Wider access across teams: Sales, logistics, expansion, and operations teams can work with spatial data without the need to manage individual user licenses.
- Reduced unused licenses: Costs are based on actual queries and workflows rather than software seats that may remain unused.
- Faster access to insights: Business teams can explore spatial data through dedicated dashboards without relying on GIS specialists for every analysis.
- Flexible growth: New projects and additional departments can be integrated without having to renegotiate seat-based licensing agreements.
CARTO's cloud-native architecture supports this approach. The platform runs spatial analytics directly within existing data warehouses such as Google BigQuery, Snowflake, and Databricks. Data remains in the organization's cloud environment, reducing the need for separate GIS servers, ETL pipelines, and duplicate data storage.
How AI Agents Change the Economics of GIS
Artificial intelligence is opening up new ways to interact with geospatial data. As AI agents take on more analytical tasks, traditional per-seat licensing models become less suited to how spatial analysis is actually used. A single automated process can perform dozens of spatial analyses in seconds, while several employees may use the same AI agent to monitor assets across different regions.
CARTO supports this development through two complementary approaches:
- CARTO AI Agents: Conversational spatial analysis that allows business users to interact with location data directly within CARTO Builder maps and deck.gl applications.
- CARTO for Agents: Enables the integration of CARTO's geospatial analysis and mapping capabilities into existing AI assistants and agentic platforms, including Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini Enterprise, and Microsoft Copilot, primarily through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
As AI agents increasingly execute complex spatial workflows on demand, the number of human users becomes less relevant as a measure of platform usage. Consumption-based pricing reflects the actual operations performed, making it easier to integrate automated spatial analysis into everyday business processes.
Pay-as-You-Go: Start Small and Scale on Demand
How much analytical capacity will a new spatial project require? Especially when developing applications or testing automated workflows, it can be difficult to predict usage in advance.
CARTO's Flexible plan allows organizations to get started without an annual commitment. Teams can deploy applications directly to production and pay monthly based on actual consumption.
Platform consumption includes operations such as workflow runs, map loads, and Analytics API calls. Additional location services, including geocoding and routing, are billed per operation. Teams can monitor their usage through the CARTO console and configure spending alerts to keep costs under control.
Get Started with CARTO and Ubilabs
With the right tools and setup, spatial analytics can become an integral part of everyday decision-making across teams.
As CARTO's partner in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, we help companies connect their existing data warehouses, set up spatial workflows, and make Location Intelligence accessible across departments.
Interested in exploring what CARTO can do for your organization? Get in touch with us to discuss your use case and request a demo.
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