The End of the Seat-Based Licensing Model

Seat-based pricing optimized for a world in which the customer's value from your software scaled roughly with how many people used it. Agentic AI breaks that assumption hard. When a single seat is operating a workflow that used to require ten people, the seat-based vendor is structurally underpricing — and the customer notices.

The shift is not entirely toward pure usage-based pricing, which has its own problems. It is toward hybrid models: a small platform fee plus metered consumption plus committed-use discounts, with enterprise pricing negotiated around outcomes. That is more complex to operate and more honest about value.