Per Seat AI Pricing: Working Out What You Pay Per Approved Output

A per seat price tells you what the software costs. It tells you nothing about whether it is worth buying. To compare per seat AI pricing against doing the work by hand, you need one number: what you pay for each output a human actually approved and used.

The arithmetic is simple. Total cost for the period, divided by the number of approved outputs in that period. Everything hard about it is in deciding what goes into each half.

Why approved outputs and not outputs

An agent that produces fifty drafts a week of which six survive review has produced six things. The other forty four consumed reviewer time and delivered nothing. If you count all fifty, you flatter the tool and hide the real cost, which is the reviewing.

So the denominator is outputs that a person approved and that went on to be used. Not generated. Not reviewed. Approved and used.

What goes in the numerator

Seat licences are the visible part. The rest is easy to forget and usually larger.

• Seat cost for everyone who has a licence, including people who barely use it
• Time spent reviewing and correcting output, priced at what that person's hour costs you
• Setup and configuration time, spread across a sensible number of months
• Time spent maintaining the setup when a process or a template changes
• Any cost of running private models yourself, if you self host

Reviewing time is the one that decides most cases. If a reviewer spends ten minutes checking a draft that took a person twenty minutes to write from scratch, you have saved ten minutes, not twenty. Price the check honestly or the whole calculation is decoration.

What to compare it against

Work out the same figure for the current way of doing the job. Take the person who does the task now, take how long it takes them, take what an hour of their time costs your organisation, and you have a cost per output done by hand.

Now you have two numbers that mean the same thing and can sit next to each other.

Be fair on both sides. Doing it by hand also has a review step in most teams. Doing it by hand also has setup cost, in the form of training somebody. Do not compare a fully loaded AI figure against a naked human one.

A worked shape, with your own figures

Fill this in with numbers from your own trial, not from anyone's marketing.

• Seats bought, times monthly seat price, gives monthly licence cost
• Approved outputs per month, counted from a log kept during the trial
• Reviewer minutes per approved output, times the reviewer's hourly cost, gives review cost per output
• Licence cost divided by approved outputs, plus review cost per output, gives your cost per approved output

Do the same three lines for the manual process and compare. Keep the period short and recent. A figure from a two week trial with a real log beats a figure from a spreadsheet built on assumptions. Run the same three lines again half a year in, when you are reviewing what the spend has actually bought.

Where per seat pricing helps and where it hurts

Per seat pricing rewards you when a small number of people produce a lot of approved output each. It punishes you when licences are spread thinly across a team where only a few people use the thing.

Before you negotiate anything, check that an agent is the right shape at all, because an assistant or a plain workflow rule is often cheaper. That gives you two levers. Reduce the number of seats to the people who actually run the workflow. And concentrate the workflow so those people get plenty of use out of it.

Modules matter here too. SicherOne is sold per seat with modules separable, which means you can buy the part your team will use rather than the whole system for everyone. Whether that helps depends on how your team splits, so check it against your own headcount rather than assuming.

Questions to ask any vendor

Before signing anything, ask these and write the answers down.

• What exactly counts as a seat, and does a read only viewer need one
• Does the price change with usage volume, and where are the limits
• What happens to the price at renewal, and is there a cap
• Can we start with fewer seats and add them, and can we reduce them
• If we self host, what changes in the price

Terms vary by vendor and by contract, so treat anything you read online as a starting point for the conversation rather than a fact about your deal.

The number that ends the argument

Once you have a cost per approved output for both methods, most disagreements dissolve. It is also the number that does the work when you are getting a sceptical finance director to approve the spend. Either the software produces useful work more cheaply than a person doing it by hand, or it does not, and no amount of enthusiasm about the technology changes the division.

If the two figures are close, the tie breaker is usually not price. It is whether the work gets done at all when the person who normally does it is busy, ill or on leave.