You go to an all you can eat restaurant. Would you find it, that it wouldn't make sense to charge for each bag you start stuffing with food? You are doing the same, using a tool to extract more value out in the same time. Of course they are gonna charge more.

You can be against licenses, because you think it should be possible to own software. (I agree somewhat with that.) But when you accept a fee for usage (aka. a license), the vendor gets to tell you the pricing units in which the usage is determined. Expecting the same cost while changing the pricing unit, isn't likely to be accepted by the seller.

Your society and your status within it are predisposed on making money. They are taxing your ability to leverage them for a leg up through new tooling. Their interests are to maximize or maintain the relative disparity between their value extraction capabilities, and yours. Otherwise they lose at the game of Money. Isn't the society we've built that we like to say is about goods and services, but is actually only about power and influence accretion through relative disparity in money extraction grand?

Don't like it? Build your own transnational ERP. /s to be clear.