A seat charges you whether or not anything ships. A salary does too. Both put the risk of a slow month on you. Pricing per completed story moves that risk to the people doing the work.
What a seat buys
A coding tool seat is cheap because it is unfinished. Somebody on your team still writes the PRD, steers the agent, makes the design calls and runs QA. The seat is the small part of the bill. The salaries driving it are the big part.
The numbers side by side
| Four-person pod | AgentCTO | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly direct salary | $45,800 | None |
| Starting spend | Three months of hiring first | $500 prepaid for 100 stories |
| Time per feature | 22 business days | 3 business days from approved PRD |
| What you pay for | Time | Completed user stories |
The pod figures use example US salaries for a designer, a frontend engineer, a backend engineer and a QA engineer, before hiring, tools or manager time.
What per-story pricing does to small asks
In a sprint, an empty state competes with a headline feature and loses. At $5 it no longer has to compete. It is its own story with its own acceptance criteria, so the backlog of small things finally gets built.
The honest limit
There is a minimum: 100 user stories a month, $500, paid in full before work begins. If you only have a handful of changes a year, this is the wrong shape for you. It fits teams with a queue that keeps growing.