Seat (per-seat licensing)

A seat is one user's licence to use a piece of software. Per-seat licensing, the most common SaaS pricing model, charges by the number of seats bought rather than by how much the software is used.

Seats are a frequent source of waste: teams buy in bulk, people leave, and the seat count is rarely trimmed at renewal. Reviewing seats against actual users before each renewal is a reliable saving.

Per-seat pricing is the only basis on which two tools can honestly be compared, and the invoice hides it. Tool A costs 480 a month for 40 seats. Tool B costs 360 a month for 24. B is the smaller line on the invoice and the more expensive licence: 15 per seat per month against A's 12, which is 180 a year per person against 144. Nothing in either figure tells you that until you divide.

Then divide by the seats in use rather than the seats bought, because that is the rate you are really paying. If 31 of A's 40 seats belong to people who open the product, the 480 is buying 31 working licences at 15.48 each, and A has quietly become the dearer of the two. The nine idle seats cost 108 a month and 1,296 a year, which is 22.5 percent of that line for nothing.

The renewal is where the two numbers meet. An uplift is applied to the contracted seat count, not the used one, so a 7 percent increase on A adds 403 to the year, and 91 of that increase buys seats nobody has opened. Per-seat contracts commonly let you add seats at any point, pro rata to the renewal date, and reduce them only at renewal, so the seat count has exactly one moment a year when it can go down. Missing that moment is what makes the arithmetic compound rather than merely repeat.

Each tool carries a seat count on its record. It sits with the licence key, behind the section labelled License key and seats in the add and edit form, and appears as a key fact on the tool's own page once set. StackTrackr does not connect to your vendors, so it cannot tell you how many of those seats anybody logged into; counting the users is a job for the vendor's own admin console, and the guide below is the hour-long review that does it.

What the record gives you is the other half of the sum and the moment to do it. The billing cycle cost and annual cost columns are the numerator, your own seat count is the denominator, and the cancellation deadline is the date by which a reduction has to be agreed rather than the renewal date itself, which is usually already too late. Set a reminder offset far enough ahead of that deadline to get the count checked, and the one moment a year when seats can come off the contract stops being the moment you find out about it.