Every software company you buy from charges per seat. It is the default, it is easy to forecast, and for a tool that a person operates it is roughly fair — more people using it, more value, more money.
It is the wrong shape for a coworker, and we spent a while working out why.
#The seat model breaks the thing we are selling
The pitch is that a coworker takes a job off your desk. Now price that per seat and watch what happens inside a company:
- Finance gets it first, because they built the case.
- Support wants it, but that is eleven more seats, so it waits for the next budget cycle.
- Somebody in operations who would have got the most out of it never asks, because they have heard the word "licence".
Six months later you have a pilot instead of a rollout, and the reason is not the product. It is that we made asking for it expensive.
Worse, the seat model prices the wrong thing. A coworker does not consume more of our infrastructure when a second person is allowed to message it. It consumes more when it does more work. Charging for the first while the cost sits in the second means we are guessing, and every guess gets padded.
#What we charge for instead
Two lines, and only two:
Line one
A flat fee for the workspace
$99 a month on Pro, $499 on Business. Pro includes four users. Business includes twenty users. There is no separate charge per user.
Line two
The work that ran
The thinking each job takes, at what the model provider charges us. No margin on top.
That second line is the one people ask about twice, so: we genuinely do not mark it up. We looked hard at the alternative, because a percentage on top of model spend is free money and everybody does it.
The moment we earn a margin on model cost, we are paid more when a job is done badly.
Here is why we did not. Every improvement we make to how little thinking a job needs would cost us revenue. We would be one incentive away from being a worse product, and incentives like that win eventually.
#What that means for you in practice
A cheap month is a cheap month. Quiet fortnight, small bill. Nobody is paying for a licence that sat unused.
You can switch to a cheaper model whenever you want. Your coworker keeps everything it has learned; only the thinking gets cheaper. If we were taking a percentage, we would quietly not want you to do that.
Caps are real controls, not warnings. Set one on a person, a team or the workspace, and work holds at the cap rather than running past it and apologising on the invoice.
You can bring your own model contract. If legal has already signed with one provider, use your keys and pay them directly. We lose that line entirely, and that is fine — it was never the business.
#The part we have not settled
We are still working out the shape of the flat fee for very large companies, where "one workspace" stops being one number and starts being a rollout with stages. We would rather say that than invent a table that looks confident and changes in three months.
What will not change is the principle: you are never billed for a person. If somebody in your company would get value from a coworker, the only thing standing between them and having one should be whether they want it.