Not the seat count times the sticker price. The number that matters is cost per developer, split into the part that is prepaid capacity and the part that is a metered bill, minus the seats nobody opened. Set your team's shape below and it prices out per month, per year, and per head.
Split people by how they work, not by seniority. The archetype decides the tier; the title never does.
An assumption, not a measurement. Nobody publishes a figure for AI coding seats; software asset management practice generally puts unused SaaS licences at 15 to 30 percent of a portfolio, so this defaults to 20.
Multiplying seats by a sticker price gives you a number that is wrong in both directions at once. Here is the method that survives contact with a finance review.
The most useful outside figure available is Anthropic's, because it is measured rather than modelled: across enterprise deployments, Claude Code averages about $13 per developer per active day and $150 to $250 per developer per month on metered billing, with 90 percent of users staying under $30 per active day. That is the honest middle of a real distribution, and it is a better anchor than any vendor's headline seat price, because it is what the work costs rather than what a licence costs.
Read it as a ceiling on flat plans and a centre on metered ones. A team on subscriptions rarely pays that much per head; a team on API keys frequently pays more, because nothing stops a run.
Three archetypes cover almost every engineering organisation, and the split is usually closer to 40 / 40 / 20 than people expect. Light users want completions and occasional answers; a $10 to $25 seat covers them completely and a $200 seat is money set on fire. Regular users run an agent for part of most days; this is where $25 to $100 lands and where most of the headcount sits. Heavy users run agents most of the day, often several at once; they are the only group where a $200 plan reliably earns out, and they are also the group most likely to hit a cap and quietly start expensing an API key on the side.
The reason to split this way rather than by team or seniority is that the archetype predicts consumption and nothing else does. A staff engineer who reviews more than they write costs less than a mid-level engineer running three agents.
These two lines behave completely differently and should never be added together without being named. On a flat plan, tokens are prepaid: one more turn costs nothing, and unused capacity is not a refund, it is waste. On an API key or a credit pool, every token is charged, and a single unattended run can move the monthly number materially. A budget that shows one blended figure cannot tell you which half of it is at risk, which is exactly the question a CFO asks in month three.
Idle licences are the only saving on this page that requires no migration, no retraining, and no negotiation. They are also the one number nobody publishes for AI coding tools specifically, which is why the calculator above labels the default as an assumption rather than dressing it up as research. Software asset management practice generally puts unused SaaS licences at 15 to 30 percent of a portfolio; whether your AI seats sit inside that band is answerable only with per-seat activity data.
Get that data before you renew. A licence count tells you what you bought. An activity report tells you what you use, and the gap between them is usually the largest single line item you can delete this quarter without anyone noticing.
Every figure read from the vendor's own pricing page or documentation and checked August 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a number, the cell says so rather than guessing.
| Tool | Individual entry | Individual heavy | Team / business seat | What the money buys |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | Pro $10 | Pro+ $39 · Max $100 | Business $19 · Enterprise $39 | Completions plus a monthly AI credit allowance. |
| Claude | Pro $20 ($17 annual) | Max 5x $100 · Max 20x $200 | Standard $25 ($20 annual) · Premium $125 ($100 annual) | Agent capacity metered by a 5-hour window and a weekly cap. |
| ChatGPT and Codex | Plus $20 | Pro $200 | Business $25 ($20 annual) | Codex rides every ChatGPT plan, including Free. |
| Cursor | Pro $20 | Pro+ and Ultra not published | Teams $40 | Editor plus an agent request pool. |
| Gemini Code Assist | Standard $22.80 monthly | Enterprise $54 monthly | Standard $19 annual · Enterprise $45 annual | No free individual tier since June 2026. |
| Devin | Pro $20 | Max $200 | Teams $40 | Autonomous sessions billed from a credit pool. |
| Continuum | Free with your own keys | Max 100 $100 · Max 200 $200 · Ultra $500 | Plus $25 per member, billed by live member count | The app is free; paid tiers add hosted inference with a weekly budget. |
Team seat prices are monthly billing unless an annual figure is named. Claude Team and ChatGPT Business both price a standard seat at $25 monthly and $20 annually, which is the closest thing to a like-for-like comparison anywhere on this table.
More detail in AI coding tool pricing compared.
Anthropic's own documentation puts metered Claude Code usage at about $13 per developer per active day and $150 to $250 per developer per month across enterprise deployments, with 90 percent of users under $30 per active day. On flat subscriptions the same work usually lands between $20 and $200 per developer per month depending on tier. A defensible planning number for a team that codes with agents daily is $100 to $200 per developer per month, with light users well under that.
On sticker price Copilot Business is cheaper at $19 per seat per month against Claude Max 5x at $100. They are not the same product: Copilot Business bundles completions plus a monthly AI credit allowance, while a Claude Max seat buys agent capacity metered by a rolling five-hour window and a weekly cap. The comparison that decides a budget is cost per developer for the work you actually run, which is why teams commonly end up with both and then discover the duplication.
There is no authoritative published figure for AI coding seats specifically. Software asset management practice generally puts unused SaaS licences somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of a portfolio, and this calculator defaults to 20 percent for that reason. Treat it as a prompt to run an audit rather than as a measurement: the only number that settles it is your own per-seat activity data.
Three levers, in order of how much they move the number. First, match the tier to the archetype, because a light user on a $200 plan is the single most expensive mistake at scale. Second, reclaim idle seats, which needs per-seat activity data rather than a licence count. Third, cap the metered portion, because seat spend is predictable and API overflow is the line that surprises people. Continuum for organizations covers the last two with weekly spend caps and model policy per team and per person.
Team seats usually cost the same money and add governance. A Claude Team premium seat is $100 per seat per month billed annually against Max 5x at $100 billed monthly, so the price is identical and the seat adds admin policy, one invoice, and a spend report. Individual subscriptions win on flexibility, since a person can move between tiers any month, and they lose on visibility: expensed subscriptions are invisible to any spend report you run.
Every figure above came out of a form, including the one about idle seats. Continuum for organizations puts weekly spend caps and model policy behind the estimate, per team and per person, with usage and spend in one view. The scan reads the AI history already on a developer's machine and prices it in about sixty seconds, so you can replace the guess with a real per-developer number before the next renewal. Turn the monthly result into a forecast with the AI budget planner.
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