What a seat means when the worker is software

Per-seat pricing assumed one person, one chair, one roughly predictable appetite. AI vendors have kept the word and quietly replaced the assumption. An essay on Standard and Premium seats, seats with no fixed cost, and what a small company should budget for instead, built from the vendors' own pages as of October 2026.

For thirty years a seat was the most honest unit in software. One person, one login, one price. The word carried an assumption so obvious nobody wrote it down: a person can only sit in one chair, type so fast, and want so much. AI assistants have kept the word and removed the assumption. The chair is still there; what sits in it is increasingly a process the person started. Both major vendors' pricing pages, read on October 10, 2026, show them working out in public what to charge for that, and this essay is about what a small company should put on the purchase order instead of a headcount.