The disclosure is directed to an access permission system that manages provisioning of access to an electronic resource through various types of access permissions. The access permission system provisions access by provisioning a license entitlement of a specified type. A provisioning optimization technique determines a combination of different types of license entitlements to be provisioned according to an optimization criterion associated with an attribute of a license entitlement. For example, the optimization criterion can based on a “unit cost” associated with a license entitlement, and the provisioning optimization technique can determine various types of license entitlements to be obtained (and therefore to be provisioned) in order to minimize a total cost of the license incurred in satisfying the consumption demand requests.