Seat-based pricing

Choose your pricing model

Sequence provides native support for businesses with seat-based pricing, including seat types, a simple API to submit seat updates and a dashboard to track seat balances and changes. With Sequence, you can automate billing for standard or tiered seat fees and optionally prorate seat upgrades. Charge a contracted minimum seat number and configure how to bill for seat overage fees.

Learn more about how to configure seat types in Sequence and programmatically update seat balances by submitting seat updates from your application.

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Concepts

Advance or arrears billing for seats

Advance or arrears billing for seats

Charge for seats based on the seat balance at the start or end of the billing period. Billing in advance charges for seats in the period (month, quarter or year) ahead, whereas billing in arrears covers seat usage from the previous period.

Contracted seats minimums

Contracted seats minimums

You can configure a minimum number of contracted seats that is always billed, regardless of actual usage. For example, if your contracted minimum is 100 seats billed monthly in arrears, but a customer is only utilizing 90 seats in a given month, they are still charged for 100 seats.

Seat overages

Seat overages

If a customer exceeds their minimum number of contracted seats, you can bill for seat overages. If you bill for regular seats quarterly or annually in advance, you can choose to bill for overages monthly, instead of waiting until the end of the normal billing period. For example, if you bill customers for 100 seats in advance at the start of the year, you can bill for overage seats at the end of the annual period or raise a bill at the end of the current month.

Prorate fees for added seats

Prorate fees for added seats

Charge a prorated fee for seats added mid-billing period (default). Disable this setting to charge the full price for added seats. For example, say you bill customers $15 per month for admin seats. If a customer adds another seat mid-month, the prorated seat charge would be approximately $7.50.

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Linear seat-based pricing

With linear seat-based pricing you set a single price and apply it to all seats your customer uses. With this pricing model, the price per seat is the same regardless of how many seats your customer uses.

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Graduated seat-based pricing

With graduated seat-based pricing, the price per seat varies as the total number of seats used moves across tiers. For example, with the configuration below the first 15 seats will be charged £12 each, and every additional seats beyond that will be charged £15.

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Worked examples

• Example 1
• Example 2
• Example 3
• Example 4

Monthly in arrears seat-based billing with proration

In this example, Simplify Saas charges its customer £15 a month per seat in arrears. Seats added mid-month are charged a prorated fee.

The customer (Flower Saas) started with zero seats. On April 18th, they added 27 seats. At the end of April, Flower Saas receives an invoices for 27 seats (prorated to £6.50), covering the period of 1 - 30 April.

Through April and May, no other seats are added. At the end of May, Flower Saas receives an invoice for 27 seats at £15 per seat.