Seat-based pricing
Charging per named user or license, often combined with usage-based pricing in hybrid plans.
Seat-based pricing charges per named user or license — a fixed fee for each person with access to the product, regardless of how much or how little that person actually uses it.
It matters because it's the pricing model most buyers already understand, and it maps cleanly onto how many products are actually adopted inside an organization: more people using the tool is a reasonable proxy for more value being delivered, and seat counts are easy for a customer's finance team to forecast and budget against.
In practice, seat-based pricing is rarely pure anymore — most modern products run a hybrid model, charging a base fee per seat and layering usage-based charges on top for the parts of the product that scale independently of headcount, like API calls, compute, or storage a handful of power users might drive disproportionately.
The common pitfall is charging per seat for a product whose actual cost or value doesn't scale with headcount — a five-person team where one person runs the vast majority of usage pays the same as a five-person team where usage is evenly spread, which can either overcharge light users or undercharge for genuinely heavy usage. A hybrid seat-plus-usage model is often the fix, not abandoning seats entirely.