Scenario controls
Overage models what usage-metered tools add when devs exceed included quotas (extra tokens/requests). It's applied only to the usage-based tiers below.
× (annual ? 0.84 : 1)
+ seats × overage × months (usage tiers)
Illustrative tiers (tap a tower or row)
| Tool tier | List $/dev/mo | Model | Total (12 mo) |
|---|
Seat pricing vs. usage pricing — why the cheap sticker can lie (both ways)
Seat (subscription) pricing
Flat $/dev/month with an included usage quota. Predictable — CFOs love it — and cheap stays cheap if your developers stay inside the quota. The catch: quotas are often defined in fuzzy units ("premium requests", "fast responses"), and agentic workflows burn them fast because one task can spawn dozens of model calls.
Usage-based pricing
You pay per token or per request, sometimes on top of a base fee. Light users pay almost nothing; a single dev running long autonomous agent sessions can invoice hundreds of dollars a month. Rule of thumb: an agentic coding session commonly consumes 100k–1M+ tokens, so per-token cost × sessions/day is the number to model — not the base fee.
The three TCO effects people miss
- Annual-commit discounts (~15–20%) flip rankings: a $20 seat billed annually (≈$16.80 effective) can undercut a $16.20 monthly seat over a year once any overage exists.
- Utilization: if only 60% of licensed devs actively use the tool, your effective price per active dev is sticker ÷ 0.6. Audit seats quarterly.
- Switching cost isn't $0: re-prompting habits, custom rules files, CI integrations. A 10% cheaper tool that costs each dev two days of ramp-up needs months to pay back — at a $800/day loaded dev cost, that's ~$1,600/dev of hidden spend.
How to actually decide
Price per accepted unit of work beats price per month: run a two-week trial per tool, count merged PRs assisted, divide spend by that. A tool costing 2× that ships 3× more accepted diffs is the cheap one. Subsidized pricing (common for new entrants buying market share) can also rise after the land-grab phase — model year 2, not just month 1.