Hacker News Reader

That's a great problem to have for a startup. "We have a ton of use that we can see through these proxy metrics, so the goal of this series c is, in addition to continuing to innovate on a product side, start investing in license auditing of companies that can't meaningfully change to another product quickly" is a pretty great pitch a few years down the line.

Unless you die because of a lack of revenue first.

I don't think most commercial users are in the business of purposefully breaking licensing agreements. Even small startups have to worry about this because it generally comes up in due diligence for VC investment. The risk of a future lawsuit, even if small, generally outweigh the savings.

IMO, the only way that would be possible is if they buried some kind of telemetry in their code. I don't support that kind of thing, but you could also pass that off to investors as "trying".