Per-seat AI licensing is a scam

Most companies are buying Copilot seats like its Office 365. One for every user. It is a bad habit and a worse deal. When you pay a fixed monthly fee per employee, you are basically subsidizing the vendor's profit margin with your own waste.

I have seen teams where one power user lives in the prompt and the other ten people use it once a week to fix a typo. Those ten "light" users are pure profit for Microsoft. They bank your $300 and give you a dollar worth of compute back.

Meanwhile, your power user hits their hidden cap by Tuesday afternoon. Now you are paying for overages on top of the idle seats you already bought. It is a brilliant business model for the vendor, but it is a stupid one for you.

A shared pool of credits is the only thing that makes actual sense. This is why I like OpenRouter. You buy a single bucket and everyone dips in. Credits go to the people doing the work. If a junior analyst needs to test a new model for ten minutes, they just use a tiny slice of the pool. You do not need to buy them a $20 license for a month of work they will never do.

AI is not a desktop app. It is a cloud service. Its value is in the tokens, not in having a button enabled. Usage-based billing is coming for everything because it follows the math of the cloud. Anything else is just a tax on companies that haven't looked at their bills yet.