Enterprise · Long-form Report
The seat licence is dying slowly, and nobody has agreed on what replaces it.
Vendors are experimenting with consumption, outcome and hybrid pricing. Buyers report that the new models are harder to budget and easier to dispute.
Independent coverage
Published 14 September 2026
7 min read
Evidence: Reporting
When software does work that used to require a person, the per-seat licence stops describing the value being sold. Vendors know this, and the pricing experiments of the past two years show it.
Three models are in play. Consumption pricing per task or token. Outcome pricing per resolved ticket, per booked meeting, per processed claim. And hybrid models with a platform fee plus a usage component.
What buyers dislike
Consumption pricing makes the bill unpredictable, which is a genuine problem for organisations that budget annually. Several procurement leads described declining an otherwise preferred product for this reason alone.
Outcome pricing has a subtler difficulty. It requires an agreed definition of the outcome, measured by a system usually controlled by the vendor. When volumes are high and margins are thin, that becomes a dispute.
What appears to work
Hybrid contracts with a committed floor, a defined unit, a cap, and an audit right over the measurement. Unromantic, but it is the structure that both sides can defend internally.
The negotiation advice buyers give each other
Fix the unit definition before discussing the rate. A favourable rate on a badly defined unit is worse than a poor rate on a precise one.
"Outcome pricing requires both sides to agree on what happened. Most contracts do not define that well enough to survive an invoice dispute."
Sources