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 real-time collaboration on artifacts, 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 — with anything beyond billed transparently as metered add-ons, 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.