Seats are the wrong axis

foldrun has no per-seat price. An account pays a flat base and three metered things — tokens, compute, storage — and invites as many people as it likes.

We are aware this leaves money on the table. Here is why we think it is the right table to leave it on.

What a seat measures

Per-seat pricing works when the person is the unit of work. A designer’s seat in a design tool is a designer designing. Double the designers, double the value; the price tracks it.

On an agent platform the person is not the unit of work. The agent is. A desk of twelve agents runs the same whether one person or six are watching the run page. What the people do is supervise: read headlines, decide approvals, notice a number that looks wrong, fix the paragraph that produced it.

Charge per supervisor and you have made supervision expensive. The account that most needs a second pair of eyes on a publisher step is the account that will decide it cannot afford one.

What the meters measure

Tokens, sandbox-seconds, and gigabytes are what agents consume. They scale with work done, which is what the customer is buying. They are visible per step on every run record, so nobody is surprised by the invoice; they are cappable at three levels, so nobody is surprised by a runaway.

There is one deliberate gap: we do not bill a per-step fee. A step is sandbox-seconds. A step fee would charge compute twice, and would push people toward fewer, larger steps, which is the opposite of the structure that makes runs legible.

And one deliberate exemption: bring your own model key, and the token meter reads zero for that step. We charge a margin on tokens we buy on your behalf. We do not charge one on tokens you already paid for.

The base fee

The flat base is what pays for the parts that do not scale with usage: the dashboard, the vault, the audit log, the person who answers the email. It is the same whether you run one agent or sixty. That is intentional; a base that scales is a seat by another name.

What we expect to happen

Teams will invite everyone. The marketing lead who owns the SEO desk, the engineer who wrote the tools, the founder who wants to see the Sunday digest. Every one of them sees every run, because a supervisor who cannot see the work is not supervising. When one of them notices a step that has been quietly refusing to write for a week, that is the seat paying for itself, and it cost nothing.