Microsoft and HG Insights Keep Seats and Move the Fight to the Usage Cap

Starting December 1, a small business that buys new Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licenses through a reseller gets the per-user seat it ordered. It also gets a pay-as-you-go meter that's already switched on. Microsoft's October 1 Partner Center update sets the meter's default limit at 4,000 Copilot Credits per user per month, which admins can raise or lower. At the $0.01 list price in Microsoft's Copilot Credits guide, that's up to $40 a month per user on top of the seat. It's the same $40 that partners such as Softcat passed on to customers when Microsoft first announced the default in mid-September with a November 2 start. The October update moved the date back a month and restated the limit in credits.

Two more vendors moved price onto a meter on October 6. HG Insights launched its Contextual Intelligence Platform on consumption-based Intelligence Credits, with Copilot modules starting at $22,000. Treasure AI said it would price email on engagement such as clicks instead of send volume, though it published no rates, tiers or start date. The same day, ServiceNow president and COO Amit Zavery told CNBC-TV18 that half of the company's net-new revenue over the past year wasn't seat-based. "Usage is a proxy for value," he said.

In September, after Zendesk's CEO committed to dropping seats, we argued that the seat was on its way out. This week’s moves are narrower than that. None of the vendors that published terms removed the seat. Each put a meter under it, and Microsoft switched its meter on by default. The seat is turning into the floor of the bill. The number to negotiate at a 2027 renewal is the meter's default cap and who pays when usage runs past it.

Every vendor that added a meter kept the seat underneath it

HG didn't need a launch to start charging by the credit. Its pricing guide already structures plans around seats licensed, credits consumed and leads processed, with extra seats sold in bundles. Credits are allocated each year and released monthly, and at most 20% of a month's unused credits roll over. The guide's own example shows how uneven the meter is. A company record with firmographics costs 0.1 credits, and a buyer-intent data point costs 3. An agent that pulls intent on every account each night burns credits 30 times faster than one refreshing firmographics. The October launch adds agents, and an MCP server that other companies' AI tools can query, both drawing on the same credits.

ServiceNow's figure is older and broader than the interview made it sound. Bill McDermott gave the same 50% on the April 22 earnings call, and his definition of non-seat business counted tokens alongside infrastructure, hardware and connectors. He described a hybrid of predictable seat licenses with usage-based charges on top. He also said that once customers see the value, many of them pick seats. Zavery described the same structure in October, with a base license fee and then charges for consumption.

Microsoft is running the same play across its own products. GitHub moved every Copilot plan to usage-based billing on June 1 and kept the plan prices, so a $19 Business seat now includes $19 of AI Credits. GitHub's documentation says paid usage beyond that allowance is on by default for organizations unless an admin turns the policy off. In late September Microsoft split its Copilot app into a seat plus metered agent features. The Copilot Business change pushes that meter down to small customers who buy through partners.

The pattern is older than this month. When Bain looked at more than 30 SaaS vendors adding generative AI in October 2025, about 65% had layered an AI meter on top of seat pricing. None had moved fully to usage or outcome pricing. Salesforce tried per-conversation pricing for Agentforce. Then, The Register reported in December, it steered customers back to seat-based agreements after they pushed for predictability. Gartner's Jan Cook told the paper that such seats often come with credit limits or fair-use caps. Nine months later Salesforce put a meter on agents that read the CRM. Vendors that start from usage and vendors that start from seats keep landing on the same structure.

HubSpot is a third, larger example. Since October 1, new HubSpot customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa buy one platform priced per seat, from €100 a month on Professional, and every email HubSpot sends for them except one-to-one inbox mail draws on HubSpot Credits at €0.01 each, according to HubSpot's pricing supplement. The first 10,000 sends cost 15 credits apiece, and the seat stayed on the bill. We worked through what that meter does to a marketing team's bill in a separate piece.

The default setting decides who pays, and resellers saw it first

The sharpest reaction to Microsoft's change came from the people who'd have to send the invoice. A thread on r/msp, posted on October 1, read the change as Microsoft billing the reseller for usage its clients' staff could switch on with a click. The original post noted that partners are on the hook to pay Microsoft whether or not a client accepts the charge. One planned to set every customer's limit to zero. Another said it would stop pushing Copilot altogether. A UK reseller in the same thread corrected the scope, and the correction is fair. The change covers new Copilot Business purchases only, and existing licenses aren't converted at renewal. The cap is also a ceiling on spend, with no minimum. Copilot Business is for organizations with 300 or fewer users, and the default won't apply at first in eleven countries, including Germany, France and India.

The meter is narrow for now. The objection to it is about the default, and most customers keep whatever default they’re given. A meter that ships switched on, with a $40 ceiling per user, makes the reseller or the customer's admin act to keep spend at zero. A meter that ships switched off makes the vendor sell each use case. Microsoft chose the first, and that choice matters more to the bill than the seat price does.

Notion took the other default this month. Since October 19 for new customers, and from November 2 for existing workspaces, each Business and Enterprise seat includes 1,500 Standard credits a month for work Notion's Auto router handles and 500 Select credits for work on a model the user picks, according to Notion's help center. The balances belong to each member, can't be pooled or rolled over, and when one runs out the work pauses until the monthly reset unless an admin has turned on workspace credits, which are off by default. That keeps the seat as the floor with a meter inside it and the meter switched off past the allowance, so Notion has to sell each extra use case to an admin. Notion's announcement also says its agents can now work on one task for more than 24 hours, and a long-running agent on a chosen model is the work that drains a 500-credit allowance fastest.

Treasure's model meets a different problem, which is deciding what counts as a click. Omeda's data found 87.3% of recorded clicks across 1.77 billion emails processed on its platform in the first quarter came from non-human sources. Most were security scanners that open links before a reader does. Event, whitepaper and webinar sends ran above 96% bot share, and B2B demand programs lean on those formats too. A price per click is only as honest as the bot filter in front of it. Treasure hasn't said how it will count one.

McDermott's own line and Salesforce's retreat cut the other way. Buyers like seats because seats are predictable, and the meters may stay small. That's probably true for a while, and it also explains why vendors keep the seat as the floor. Buyers chose the seat, and vendors answered by attaching a capped meter that’s increasingly switched on.

What this means for SaaS buyers and sellers

Ask each vendor four things in writing: whether the meter is on or off by default, the default cap per user or per account, who gets billed, and what happens at the cap. "Stops" and "bills overage at list price" are different contracts. Put the answers in the order form.

Model the meter per workflow before signing. HG's 0.1-versus-3 example is the template. Price the most expensive action an agent will repeat and multiply by accounts and runs. Then compare it with the credit block on offer. Because HG lets at most 20% of a month's unused credits roll over, most of an oversized block simply expires.

For engagement-priced email, ask how a billable click is defined and whether scanner clicks are removed before the invoice. Get the filtering method named. If Omeda's numbers hold for your sends, an unfiltered click count in B2B would mostly bill you for bots.

Sellers adding a meter should publish the cap and the spend alerts on the pricing page and in the proposal. If a partner bills the customer, give the partner a per-customer off switch and a pass-through clause before the first invoice. That’s the fix the r/msp thread asked for. The comp plan needs the same split, and our piece on Stripe's hybrid-pricing data covers how to pay reps on the consumed line.

My bet is that the next large seat-priced vendor to add a meter will ship it the way Microsoft and GitHub did, switched on with a default cap. The 2027 price-list changes will show whether that's right. If it is, the default cap becomes the line procurement fights over, and the seat price becomes the easy part of the deal.

The number to negotiate at a 2027 renewal is the meter's default cap and who pays when usage runs past it.

Ask each vendor in writing whether its meter is on or off by default, the default cap, who gets billed, and what happens at the cap, then put the answers in the order form.

By Business of GTM