C1 is transitioning to usage-based pricing, powered by C1 Tokens.
Every major era of software changes two things at once: what companies can do, and what companies are. Software used to live in boxes. You shipped once a year, ran massive QA cycles, and hoped nothing catastrophic made it onto a disc. Entire organizations were shaped by that reality.
Then SaaS rewired everything. Cloud delivery made software flexible. The business model shifted to per-user, per-month pricing, and companies optimized around selling seats and expanding SKUs. That model worked when humans clicked the buttons.
Seat-based pricing collapses when agents do the work#
Per-seat pricing assumes a one-to-one relationship between users and value. You pay for how many people might log in. That assumption held when humans were the only actors in the system.
That's changed.
Non-human identities already outnumber humans anywhere from twenty-five to fifty times in the average enterprise. Bots, service accounts, and AI agents perform meaningful work inside production systems every second of every day. They need access and credentials. They consume resources. They are governed by policy.
None of them have a "seat".
With per-seat pricing, you end up in one of two positions. You overpay for light users who barely touch the platform but still need a license. Or you restrict access to control cost, keeping the people who could benefit from broader adoption out. Either way, you are not paying for the value the platform delivers. You are paying for a headcount proxy that increasingly has nothing to do with the work being done.
Our own research found that 90% of organizations were using autonomous agents. Every one of those agents will need identity, access, and governance. But per-seat pricing doesn't account for any of that work. You end up paying for human licenses that sit idle while automations and agents drive the actual volume.
Usage-based pricing solves problems that buyers everywhere struggle with. No more shelfware. No more paying for seats that sit idle while the platform is being implemented. No more clunky upsells just to unlock another product. With C1 Tokens, you get access to the entire platform and only pay for what you actually use.
Putting our money where our mouth is#
At C1, we are moving to usage-based pricing. We price around the meaningful actions your organization performs: access requests processed, entitlements changed, MCP tool calls, accounts provisioned, AI client connections, policies enforced. Not headcount.
Our product already works this way. Identity governance is workflow and automation-driven by nature. Something happens, a policy evaluates, an action is taken. That maps to consumption, not seats. Our newest product, AI Access Management, has been usage-based from day one: billed per tool call, scaling with the actual work the platform performs.
We believe so strongly that the agentic enterprise is the future that we are betting our revenue on it. That is not something you do if you think this is a passing trend. You do it when you have seen enough to know the old model will not survive the transition.
We are not just building for the agentic enterprise. We run as one. From how we manage our own HR programs to how we ship software through Squire, our agentic-first development environment, agents are embedded in how C1 operates every day. When your own company runs on agents, you learn fast which pricing model reflects reality and which one you are fighting against.
We built two purchase options: prepaid annual credits for teams that want budget certainty, and pay-as-you-go for teams that want flexibility. Real-time usage dashboards. Threshold alerts. The ability to top up at your contracted rate, and rollover unused or unspent credits.
Identity is infrastructure. Price it that way.#
In the agentic enterprise, identity is always-on infrastructure. It mediates every agent action. It enforces policy in real time. It operates at machine speed. That is not a feature upgrade. That is a category change.
Infrastructure gets priced on consumption. Every major infrastructure company arrived at the same conclusion: value is measured in throughput, not headcount. The same logic applies to identity.
Legacy identity platforms still price per seat. They are adding agent governance features, layering AI capabilities on top of architectures built for a different era. But their commercial model still assumes humans are the primary identity. That assumption no longer holds. You cannot bolt an agentic future onto a per-seat commercial model and call it a strategy.
Where this goes#
Five years from now, charging per seat for identity will feel as dated as shipping software on CD-ROMs.
The companies that make this shift first will not just price better. They will build better, because usage data tells you what customers actually value.
If you'd like to learn more, get in touch.
