Who's paying for unused AI coding seats? Per-seat billing is quietly leaking money
rcleffke · reddit · 2026-11-13
A practitioner flags a common enterprise problem: per-seat AI coding tools keep billing for departed or transferred employees because nobody removes their seats, while usage-billed tools swing the other way—one busy month or a long-running agent session spikes the bill.
The author, who runs an agent-tools rankings site, lists current scores: Cursor 8.75/10, Claude Code 8.4, Windsurf 8.05, GitHub Copilot 7.4, Aider 7.3, Continue 6.7. He also points to GitHub's Nov 10 changelog allowing enterprise GitHub Apps to call Copilot seat-management APIs, tying seat assignment to internal systems.
He asks: which billing model is easier to control, who owns the access list and how often it's audited, and how teams cap model bills run up by open-source agents. (Self-promotional disclosure included.)
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