Credits, seats and the honest cost of coverage

Pricing models are not neutral. They encode an assumption about what you are buying, and that assumption leaks into how you use the product.

What per-seat assumes

Per-seat pricing assumes the scarce thing is people. That is true for a CRM, where a seat maps to a human doing work, and the number of humans is the number of humans regardless of how busy they are.

Applied to customer contact, it produces a strange incentive: the cost is fixed against headcount while the value scales with volume. In practice that means teams ration seats. The person who would benefit from access does not get it, because a seat costs more than the marginal value of that one person’s occasional use.

You end up with a shared login, which defeats the reporting, or with a channel nobody watches, which defeats the point.

What per-message assumes

Credits assume the scarce thing is conversation volume, which for an agent is closer to true — the cost of answering scales with the answering.

The arithmetic is different in three ways worth understanding before you compare plans:

1. Cost moves with demand, in both directions. A quiet January costs less than a busy June. This is good for seasonal businesses and mildly uncomfortable for budgeting, because the number is not flat.

2. Adding people is free. Everyone who should see the inbox can see it. There is no conversation about whether a part-timer justifies a seat.

3. The unit prices are not equal. A message and a phone minute are not the same amount of work, and honest pricing reflects that. Here it is one credit per message or email, three per SMS, ten per minute of call — so a channel mix that skews to voice costs meaningfully more than one that skews to chat.

That third point is the one that surprises people, and it is the one to model before you pick a plan.

The comparison people get wrong

The common mistake is comparing a per-seat quote to a credit quote at current volume. That understates the difference, because the whole point of covering the evening is that you will answer more conversations than you do now.

The right comparison is at the volume you will have once nothing goes unanswered — which is higher, and which is the volume where per-seat looks cheap and under-delivers, while credits cost more and actually cover it.

A reasonable way to choose

• Estimate conversations per month, split by channel, at covered volume — not today’s answered volume.
• Convert to credits using the rates above.
• Compare against the included allowance, and check what overage costs, because that is where the real difference between plans lives.
• Sanity-check the seat count you would have needed. If it is more than two or three, per-seat was never going to be the cheap option.

The calculator on the homepage does this arithmetic if you would rather not. Nothing is saved, and it does not ask for an email.