ai
AI·COM · PRICING STRATEGY · CEO REVIEW · JULY 2026

Pricing

30+ companies · 5 categories researched
The market, read whole

Seats price the person. Credits price the agent.

Across 30+ AI companies — the labs, the copilots, the sales-led platforms, the agent-native startups — pricing has converged on one structure: a per-seat base for access and governance, a metered credit pool for agent work. This page holds the research, the candidate models for ai·com, a live economics simulator, and one recommendation.

Hybrid seat + usage: 41% of vendors and rising Seat-only vendors post ~40% lower gross margins
2024 → 2026

Four shifts that settle the argument

01

The AI add-on died

Google, Slack and Notion all killed their $8–30 add-ons within 18 months and folded AI into base tiers, raising base prices 15–25%. AI in the seat is now table stakes.

02

Seats split from credits

OpenAI, Microsoft, GitHub and Notion all shipped the same split in 2025–26: the seat covers the person, a metered credit pool covers agent runs — because agent cost varies ~5× per run.

03

Multipliers beat features

The $20 → $100 (5×) → $200 (20×) ladder is now category convention at all three labs. Buyers upgrade for more of the same — easier to sell, easier to meter than feature gates.

04

Seat prices compressed

OpenAI cut ChatGPT Business 20% to $20. Notion Business with full AI sits at $20. The seat is commoditizing toward $20; durable margin lives in the usage layer.

Taxonomy

Eight ways the market charges

Every pricing model observed, with its exemplars and its verdict for a self-serve agentic platform.

1

Per-seat, flat

Slack $7.25 · Notion $20 · ChatGPT Business $20

Predictable and procurement-friendly — and it undercharges agents. Seat-only AI vendors run ~40% below hybrid peers on gross margin.

2

Seat ladder (multipliers)

All three labs: $20 → $100 (5×) → $200 (20×)

Same product, more usage. Vendors stopped publishing absolute limits to keep repricing freedom.

3

Seat + credit hybrid

GitHub · M365 Copilot · Dust · Linear · Notion agents

The converged default: 41% of vendors, the highest blended margins. Pooled org credits beat per-seat allowances.

4

Pure consumption

Devin ACUs · Manus · Zapier · v0 · Replit

Scales with work done — and is CFO-hostile. Price discovered after the run caused every 2025 backlash.

5

Outcome-based

Sierra ~$1.50 · Fin $0.99/resolution · Agentforce $2/conv.

Works only where the outcome is discrete, machine-verifiable, and priced against labor. 11x priced outcomes, delivered activity — 70–90% churn.

6

Flat per-org

Moveworks $15–45/employee/yr

Whole-company platform fee. Removes adoption risk, forces CIO-level sales — and heavy users become the least profitable customers.

7

Sales-led, opaque

Glean ~$99K median · Harvey ~$1,200/seat/mo

Maximum price discrimination, minimum velocity: 3–6 month cycles, 15–40% negotiated off list. Only pays above ~$50–60K ACV.

8

Bundled into base

Google Workspace $7–22 with Gemini inside

The incumbent's defensive move — collapse the price umbrella so startups can't sell AI as a line item. Compresses everyone's seat price.

Competitive map

Where everyone stands — and where ai·com lands

Effective price per person per month (log scale) against how revenue is metered. The shaded band is what a 2–50 team pays today for the stack ai·com replaces. Hover any dot.

The stack anchor. A team paying full freight for Slack + Notion + ChatGPT Business pays $37–55 per person per month. One platform replacing all three credibly charges $25–40 — under the stack, above the $20 gravity line, with agent usage metered on top.
The evidence

The market, one table

CompanyModelPriceSignal
Prices verified July 2026 against vendor pages where published; sales-led figures are procurement-reported (Vendr, Metronome) and marked (rep.). Full source list in the research appendix held by the team.
Candidate architectures

Five ways ai·com could charge.
Scored, not guessed.

Every viable permutation of the market's eight models, applied to our shape: workspaces of 2–50, an agent for every person, connectors driving ambient compute. Scored against the five things the pricing must do at once.

Self-serve fit — no sales call, ever Margin — token COGS must stay under 40% of revenue Identity — a seat is a person and their agent
The five

Architectures A–E

B wins on the composite — 86 of 100. It is the only architecture that scores above 75 on every criterion: self-serve like A, margin-protected like D, and it prices exactly what ai·com is — a seat for every person, a meter for every agent. A and C win on simplicity but bleed margin as agent usage grows; D and E price the agent well but break the no-sales-call promise. Feel each one's economics in the Simulator.
Ruled out

Permutations we examined and killed

Price per API callai·com is not an API-first product. The API is a Command-tier feature; making it the meter prices the platform like plumbing.
Price per ConnectorTaxes the exact behavior that makes the product smarter. Every connector added should be free expansion of our moat, not a billing event.
Pure outcome ("per verified done")Our cleanest unit — but ambient value (the brief, Rooms, memory) has no countable outcome. Keep verified-done as the trust metric, not the meter.
Per-employee org licenseMoveworks' model needs a CIO sale and an 8–16 week deployment. Wrong motion for teams of 2–50 who want to feel it by Friday.
AI as a paid add-onThe market already ran this experiment. Google, Slack and Notion all killed their add-ons — the agent is the product, not an upsell.
Economics, live

Feel each model break or hold.

One revenue-and-margin engine, five architectures. Move the sliders; watch where the margin goes as agent usage grows. The red line to respect: when model COGS crosses 40% of revenue, the pricing model is broken.

Simulator

Architecture

MRR
—
ARR
—
annualized
Gross margin
—
after model COGS
Effective / seat
—
revenue ÷ seats
COGS share
—
rule: stay under 40%
Revenue mix
Seats / base—
Usage / outcomes—
Gross margin vs agent usage — runs per seat per month
Margin at each usage level▲ marks the current slider
Cost per run spans a brief refresh (~$0.01) to a long multi-step Goal run (~$0.25). The unresolved product question Q4 — Command Center ingest cadence — sets the real free-tier cost and must be answered before the free tier ships. Free-tier COGS is excluded here; it is a customer-acquisition cost, not a margin question.
The recommendation

Architecture B. Three tiers, one meter.

A seat for every person and their agent. A pooled credit allowance for agent work, with published top-up rates and hard spend controls. Self-serve end to end — including enterprise controls. No sales call anywhere.

Undercuts the $37–55 replaced stackMargin holds as agent usage grows
Straw-man tiers

The card we should ship

Free

$0one person, forever
  • Your agent on every surface, daily brief
  • 3 Connectors · 3 Routines
  • Metered daily agent allowance
  • Checkpoint on everything external
The wedge. Every workspace starts as one person. Graceful walls that name the Team tier.
Teams of 2–50

Team

$25per seat / month, annual · $30 monthly
  • An agent for every person — one each
  • All Connectors · unlimited Routines · Rooms, Calls, Vault
  • Pooled workspace credits (≈$8/seat of agent runs included)
  • Top-ups at published rates · admin spend caps · estimates before runs
  • Fair billing — idle seats credit back
$5 under the draft card, $12+ under the replaced stack, $5 above the gravity line — paid for by the usage layer.

Command

$60per seat / month, annual
  • 5× pooled credits · priority routing, 20+ model providers
  • Goals with bigger run budgets
  • API endpoints · plugin SDK · MCP
  • SSO · SCIM · audit log — enterprise controls, self-serve
The agent-heavy tier, per seat — not flat. The multiplier ladder the whole market now trains buyers on.
Versus the draft

What changes on the landing page

The current card is flagged CONFIRM in the code. Three changes resolve it.

Team $29 / seat
Team $25 / seat + pooled credits

The market compressed to $20 while the draft sat at $29. $25 undercuts the replaced stack decisively; the credit pool recovers the difference from teams that use agents hard.

Command $299 flat, whole team
Command $60 / seat

Flat pricing is adverse-selection bait: the heaviest agent teams become the least profitable customers. Per-seat with a 5× pool keeps the simplicity and fixes the economics.

No usage meter anywhere
Credits designed in from day one

Every vendor that retrofitted a meter onto "unlimited" — Cursor, Replit — paid for it in refunds and trust. The meter ships with the card, with estimates before runs and caps.

The fork

Enterprise: self-serve controls now, a sales lane only when pulled

RecommendedSelf-serve enterprise

Anthropic proved the pattern in 2026: SSO, SCIM, audit and spend controls activated self-serve, usage metered on top of the seat. It keeps the strategy deck's promise — no pilots, no procurement, no seat minimums — and it is how the multitenant platform sells itself.

  • Enterprise controls live in Command, not behind a quote
  • Published rate card — opacity is a margin strategy we don't need yet
  • Workspace, seats and billing already gate on T2 — same machinery

Later, if pulledSales-assisted lane

Contact-sales only pays above a ~$50–60K annual contract — Glean's median is $99K with 100-seat floors and 3–6 month cycles. That machine is premature for teams of 2–50.

  • Trigger: repeated 150+ seat workspaces, or people-layer buyers needing DPAs, residency, custom terms
  • Shape when it comes: platform fee + seats + the same credit meter — never a different product
  • Until then: the biggest workspace self-serves like the smallest
Principles

Rules the market taught the hard way

Never reprice retroactively Estimate cost before every run Admin spend caps, hard ones Idle seats credit back Publish the rate card Pooled credits, not per-seat allowances Model COGS < 40% of revenue Agents meter on their own unit — never per task-step
The cautionary tales are specific. Cursor silently converted "unlimited" to usage (June 2025) — apology, refunds, trust damage. Replit priced effort after the run — the "pricing casino." 11x charged worker-replacement prices for activity, not outcomes — 70–90% churn. All three failures are one failure: the buyer discovered the price after the commitment.
Sequencing

What gates shipping this card

T1.3 · Billing self-serveStripe and the tiers exist but are dead-coded in-app. We cannot charge money we can't let people manage.
T2.1 · Workspaces & seatsBilling must follow the workspace, not the individual. Stripe today knows one seat.
T2.3 · Team billingProrated seat add, credit on remove — always shown as people, never an abstract quantity.
Credit meter in R1The meter, estimates and caps ship with the first paid workspace — retrofitting is the one known way to burn trust.
Q4 · Ingest economicsFree tier syncs N times a day; paid syncs continuously. Cost model decides N — resolve before the free tier ships.
Vocabulary per the ratified glossary: workspace owns the plan; a seat is one person plus their agent; a run is one Routine execution. Fair billing follows membership automatically — seats sync, never sold as an abstract quantity.