To the person(s) that decided it was a good idea to blast fireworks off in a middle of a street where cars are going by, next to acres of DEAD and DRY brush, cause a fire, and drive off, FUCK YOU.
Venting and posting here in case anyone else ever runs into this issue. Not looking for help as issue is resolved, just complaining.
License: Google Workspace Enterprise Plus
Billing type: Flexible monthly billing (it's taking forever to get a 3 year contract for licenses signed (Been trying since Oct 2025, that's a different matter).
Issue: Invisible seat cap
Licenses used: 195
Seats used: 605
One day, I get a notification from our HRIS that a new user cannot be created due to running out of licenses.
"Weird, we shouldn't have that issue on flexible billing?". I check the Google Workspace admin logs and I don't see any activity, so I thought it's an issue with the HRIS because their error message is "unauthorized action".
Then I figure, maybe I'll try making the account myself, and I get an error message:
>No license available for new user
You have reached the 605 user limit for your organization.
• If you are trying to add more users than committed contract seats, purchase additional licenses
• In case you've hit the max seat cap of 300 for a Business subscription, upgrade to Enterprise or contact sales
• In case none of the above is true, please contact support
I contact support (because none of the above applied) and they loop me around for a few hours, one rep tries to send me to the black hole of customer support links and tells me to contact smb-workspace-renewals@google.com. The next rep tells me the obvious and then sends me to Billing who says:
" I can confirm that you have 300 maximum seat limits on your Google Workspace Enterprise Plus subscription"
...what? Some fine print on Google's page says: "Starter, Standard, and Plus plans can be purchased for a maximum of 300 users. There is no minimum or maximum user limit for Enterprise plans."
I let the support rep know this and they say:
>I understand that, I would like to give you a heads up that your seat limits will increase gradually. This is just Google's policy to prevent abuse by adding more users to the account, which is why manually increasing the max seat is still needed.
OK, I understand the rationale, but it shouldn't be a mystery to the admins troubleshooting this issue that there's a seat limit in the Google Workspace accounts. It spent a few hours trying to trouble shoot the wrong thing.
To actually talk to a person and resolve the issue, I used the (?) support in the admin UI and had to get mad at them several times (and our customer rep to upgrade the issue to a P1) before they finally transferred me to billing to increase the account seat cap to resolve the issue.
TLDR: Invisible seat (not license) cap for Google Workspace Enterprise should be VISIBLE in the UI and there should be a support doc on increasing seats if someone runs into the issue.
Billing updated the seat cap and resolved this issue.