The per-seat model was built for humans in chairs. AI agents don't sit in chairs.

Every seat an agent replaces is pure margin — unless your vendor keeps charging you for it.

The Per-Seat Math

What 500 seats actually cost over five years.

Enterprise SaaS pricing is designed to grow faster than your headcount. Escalators, add-on SKUs, AI surcharges, and platform fees compound every renewal cycle. Here's the math your vendor hopes you won't do.

 SaaS VendorCustom Build
500 users, Year 1~$1.3M–$2.0MOne-time build (scope confirmed in Assessment)
Year 2 (renewal + escalator)~$1.4M–$2.1MMSA, no renewal escalator
Year 3~$1.5M–$2.2MMSA, flat year-over-year
Years 4–5~$3.1M–$4.5MMSA, flat year-over-year
5-year total$6M–$10MA fraction of the vendor total
Net savings vs vendor midpoint~65–85%

These numbers assume a mid-market Salesforce deployment. SAP and ServiceNow deployments are typically higher. The custom build includes AI-assisted development, infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance.

The Double Ransom

They charge for the seats. Then they charge for the AI that replaces the seats.

Salesforce layers a $550/user/month Agentforce 1 seat upgrade, Data Cloud infrastructure at $65K–$175K/year, and per-conversation or per-action usage fees on top of the Enterprise license you already pay. ServiceNow Now Assist adds 25–60% on top of base ITSM. You're paying for humans and the machines that replace them — simultaneously. That's the double ransom.

 What Your Vendor ChargesWhat We Build
User access$175–$500/user/moNo per-seat pricing
AI seat upgrade (Agentforce 1)$550/user/mo (on top of Enterprise)None
Required agent infrastructureData Cloud, $65K–$175K/yrYour cloud, no extra cost
Conversation / action fees$2/conv or $0.10/actionNo vendor metering
Agent architecture ceiling15 topics × 15 actions per topicNone
Data accessTheir silo onlyAcross your full operational data
Platform limitsGovernor limits, API capsNo artificial limits

$550/user/month Agentforce 1 seat upgrade times 500 users equals $3.3M per year, before Data Cloud infrastructure, before conversation fees, before credit consumption. The same agent capability on a purpose-built system carries no per-seat ransom and no per-conversation metering. And the agent reads across your full operational data, your CRM, ERP, support records, documents, and data warehouse, not just what is inside one vendor's silo.

And it is not only Salesforce. SAP's April 2026 API policy formalized the agent-toll model at the contract layer: third-party AI agents acting on SAP data must now route through SAP's own AI runtime, where access is metered. Whatever your incumbent vendor said about openness, the binding text is the policy.

The Seat Problem

When AI handles 80% of tier-1 support, ServiceNow still charges for 200 seats. We don't.

The per-seat pricing model assumes humans in chairs. Every workflow routed through your platform requires a licensed user — even if that “user” is an automation that runs unattended. The vendor's revenue depends on the seat count never going down.

AI changes the economics fundamentally. Agents handle ticket triage, data entry, report generation, and first-response support. The humans who remain do higher-value work — but the vendor still charges the same per-seat rate for every one of them, plus a new surcharge for the AI layer.

Our pricing model assumes agents doing work. You pay for compute, not chairs. When automation reduces your headcount requirements, your software costs go down — not up.

After Migration

The MSA: what you pay after migration.

After migration, a single MSA replaces everything SaaS bundled: infrastructure, security, compliance, incident response, and development. All under a contract with defined SLAs.

Managed Standard

Annual / 2-yr min

Business-hours incident response

Single-platform replacement. Infrastructure, security, compliance, incident response, and ongoing development. Ideal for companies that migrated one major module.

Managed Growth

Annual / 2-yr min

Priority incident response

Multi-module or multi-platform. Expanded infrastructure, dedicated engineering capacity, quarterly roadmap planning, and priority incident response.

Managed Enterprise

Annual / 3-yr min

24/7 incident response

Full enterprise stack replacement. Dedicated team, 24/7 operations, compliance automation, and continuous development against your product roadmap.

Compare these numbers to your current annual SaaS spend. The MSA replaces millions in annual vendor licensing, and includes active development at a 5-day-max change cadence, not just access. The specific fee is a function of the system's scope and SLA tier; we confirm it in the intake.

The Assessment is the small question with the answer to the big one.

70–120 hours. 2–3 weeks. You get a complete migration business case: what it costs to leave, what it costs to stay, and whether it's viable. If it's not, we tell you.

A demo-able artifact every day, working software in your hands every week.