What are you buying when the AI holds the seat?
Per-seat pricing assumed one human, one login. Now half the industry is quietly moving to consumption meters you cannot forecast. We priced it the boring way instead: a seat is a seat, whoever is sitting in it.
Software pricing used to describe something you could count: how many people would log in. Everyone understood it, finance could forecast it, and nobody needed a calculator on the pricing page.
AI broke the assumption underneath it. If an agent works your queue at three in the morning, is that a seat? If it handles four hundred enquiries in a bad week, is that four hundred somethings? A lot of vendors answered by moving to consumption meters — credits, tasks, actions, "AI units" — and quietly moved the risk onto you.
A meter you cannot forecast is not a price. It is an invitation to find out later.
Why consumption pricing feels reasonable and is not
The pitch is fair-sounding: pay for what you use. The problem is that you do not control usage — your customers do. The month your biggest client escalates, or your festive season doubles enquiries, is exactly the month the bill spikes. You are charged most in the month you can least afford surprises.
It also makes the vendor structurally uninterested in efficiency. Every retry, every unnecessary summary, every over-eager background job is revenue. Nobody sets out to be that company, but incentives do not need intent.
The boring alternative
We priced it the dull way. A seat is a seat, whether a person or an agent is sitting in it, and the tier decides how much of the work you hand to AI. Three ways to run it — traditional, hybrid, AI-native — priced per seat, monthly or annual, with a five-seat minimum. If you double your enquiry volume next month, your bill does not move.
That is not generosity, it is a bet. We think teams stay longer with a vendor whose invoice they can predict, and we would rather compete on whether the product works than on how cleverly the meter is set.
Three questions before you sign anything
Whatever you buy, buy a number you can put in a budget. Everything else is a variable someone else controls.