Glossary term
Seat-Based Pricing
Per-user-per-month SaaS pricing; structurally vulnerable to agent-driven seat compression as software replaces human operators.
Seat-Based Pricing charges per user per month, the dominant SaaS model of the 2010s built on the assumption that more value means more human operators. The Closelook view is that this model is structurally vulnerable to agentic AI: when an agent does the work of several humans, the customer needs fewer seats, so revenue can fall even as the software delivers more value. Seat compression is the specific mechanism by which agentic disruption hits incumbent SaaS revenue. See SaaSpocalypse 101.