Every modern AI company is moving to pure usage-based pricing. You chose a hybrid of seats plus an AI allowance. Explain the value metric — why should I believe seats are not a legacy crutch?

The full executive answer

We price on two axes because the product creates value on two axes. Seats price collaboration — the boardroom is inherently multi-player, and features like discussion threads on board papers, director briefings, and approval workflows scale with the number of executives in the room. The AI allowance prices compute — every tier ships a governed monthly AI budget baked into the code: $3 on Trial, $12 on Basic, $45 on Pro, $150 on Max, unlimited on Enterprise — and a team that outgrows its allowance moves up a plan; there are no overage charges, exactly as the pricing page states.

Why not pure usage? Because CFOs hate it. Pure usage makes the bill unforecastable, which triggers procurement friction and budget anxiety — the opposite of what a board platform should feel like. The hybrid gives the buyer a predictable base with a governed variable component, and gives us COGS protection: the allowance means a heavy AI user cannot silently destroy gross margin, which is what keeps us on the right side of the Rule of 40 as we scale — growth plus margin, not growth at margin’s expense.

The honest framing: this is our opening position, instrumented to evolve. The allowance values live in environment-overridable config, and the revenue-recognition function in the billing module already handles custom and annual amounts — so if the market pulls us toward usage, we can follow without re-architecting billing.