I know Flexera well. They regularly do "license compliance shakedowns". This is not some trade secret, lots of ISV's do it. So the following is describing br

I know Flexera well. They regularly do "license compliance shakedowns". This is not some trade secret, lots of ISV's do it. So the following is describing broadly how ISV's do it and nothing specific to Flexera. The way it works is to have a licensing model not enforced perfectly by the DRM. Sell licenses per user, per machine, but allow usage outside that in some way. Make it the customer's duty to enforce license usage instead of the vendor. Wait a while. Sales comes back and runs an audit, they see more users than licensed in the last X amount of time and require a "true up" fee before more licenses can be sold, or possibly under threat of terminating existing licenses. The intent is to use the threat of disruption to the business as leverage to cough up more revenue than the customer planned to provide initially per their license agreement. It is shady, but it works, and a widespread practice.