What AI seats cost a 30-person startup in 2026, and where the money leaks

The sample bill, at list prices

Sample data The company in this guide is made up; the prices are not. It has 30 people, 12 of them engineers. Everyone has Google Workspace, Slack and Notion. Fifteen people use Claude Team and ten use ChatGPT Business, with a few Premium seats for the heaviest users. All 12 engineers have Cursor Teams and GitHub Copilot Business, three of them on Cursor Premium. Two people left this year.

Sample data: a fictional company. Plans: Google Workspace Business Standard, Slack Pro, Notion Business, Claude Team, ChatGPT Business, Cursor Teams and GitHub Copilot Business. Seat counts include the two people who left (see leak 2). USD per seat per month, list prices as of October 2026 on annual billing where offered (Cursor and Copilot at their listed monthly price), from Google Workspace, Slack, Notion, Claude, OpenAI, Cursor and GitHub.

Leave out the leavers’ seats and the 30 people’s AI seats cost $1,928 a month. Put every one of those seats on Standard and it’s $1,208. That’s the range at the top of this page, and one decision moves it more than any other: how many Premium seats you hand out.

Leak 1: Premium seats used at Standard level

Claude Team, ChatGPT Business and Cursor Teams all sell two seat types. In each, what Premium adds is room: Anthropic lists “higher usage limits,” OpenAI “5x more usage than Standard seats,” and Cursor “5x the Standard limits on Agent.” In all three, the step up costs the same $80 a seat per month.

USD per seat per month. Claude and ChatGPT on annual billing (billed monthly: $25 and $125); Cursor at its listed price. As of October 2026, from claude.com/pricing, the ChatGPT Business release notes and Cursor’s pricing docs.

A Premium seat pays off for someone who would otherwise hit the Standard limit most weeks. For anyone else it’s $80 a month, $960 a year, for room they never use. For the example we assume that 2 of the 4 Claude Premium members, 1 of the 2 on ChatGPT and 1 of the 3 on Cursor never use more than a Standard seat allows. That’s 4 seats and $320 a month.

The guides to Claude Team Premium vs Standard and ChatGPT Business Premium seats show how to find these people in each admin console.

Leak 2: seats still held by people who left

In the example, both leavers’ Google accounts were closed on their last day, and Slack took care of itself: its Fair Billing Policy credits members who haven’t used Slack in over 28 days. Everything else is still assigned to them.

Sample data, at the list prices in the bill above.

Why they slip through: on Claude Team and Cursor Teams, automatic provisioning (SCIM) is an Enterprise feature, so each leaver is removed by hand, tool by tool. And removing the person is only half the job. In Claude Team and ChatGPT Business, a removed member’s seat stays paid until you also lower the seat count, and GitHub keeps billing a removed Copilot seat until the end of the billing cycle. In the example that’s $139 a month, $1,668 a year, for two people who no longer work there.

Leak 3: Cursor and Copilot for the same engineers

All 12 engineers have a Cursor seat and a Copilot seat. Both put AI completion and chat in the editor, so most people settle on one, and the other seat keeps billing. In the example, 5 engineers work in Cursor every day and haven’t touched Copilot in 30 days: 5 × $19 = $95 a month.

The reverse costs more. An engineer who sticks with Copilot leaves an unused Cursor seat behind: $40 a month, or $120 on Premium. Neither admin console can see the other tool, so the overlap only shows when you put the two seat lists side by side. The guide to spotting Cursor and Copilot overlap shows how.

What it adds up to

Sample data, at the list prices in the bill above.

That’s $554 of a $3,304.50 monthly bill, about one dollar in six. The example is deliberately tidy: 11 of its 145 seats are unused and 4 are on the wrong tier. Across all SaaS, Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index found that organizations leave 36% of their licenses unused on average.

When a fix shows up on the bill

Finding a leak and no longer paying for it happen on different dates. Each vendor has its own rule.

As of October 2026, from the Claude Help Center, the ChatGPT Business FAQ, Cursor’s team pricing docs and GitHub Docs.

Claude Team is the one to watch. On an annual plan, a Premium seat that should have been Standard, spotted three months after renewal, still costs $80 a month for the nine months that are left: $720. Check before each renewal, not after.

What the vendors already show you for free

Before you pay anyone to find these leaks, know what you already have. Each vendor’s own admin console covers part of it, and for a team with one or two AI tools that may be enough.

From the Claude Help Center, the ChatGPT Business release notes (16 April 2026), GitHub’s REST API docs, Cursor’s analytics docs, Slack’s Fair Billing Policy, claude.com/pricing and Cursor’s team pricing docs.

Check those views a month before each renewal and you’ll catch the idle seats in each tool. What they can’t give you is the picture across tools: the same leaver in five consoles, the same engineer in two editors, and renewals on five different dates.

How to check your own bill

1. List every AI tool the company pays for, including any expensed on personal cards, with its renewal date. Start with whichever renews first.
2. Take everyone who left this year and search each admin console for their email. Remove them, then lower the paid seat count: in Claude Team and ChatGPT Business, removing a member frees the seat but doesn’t shrink the bill.
3. In Claude Team, ChatGPT Business and Cursor Teams, list who holds a Premium seat and check how much each person used last month. In ChatGPT and Cursor, Premium is five times Standard’s usage, so anyone well under a fifth of it would have fit on Standard. Move those people down a tier.
4. Match Cursor’s active users against Copilot’s last activity dates and remove the seats nobody uses.
5. Then look for idle seats in each tool: how to find unused ChatGPT and Claude seats.

Put each renewal date in the calendar with a reminder a month ahead, and repeat the check each time.

How SeatLeak automates it

SeatLeak runs this check every month across all your tools at once. It reads seat lists and activity through read-only admin access and a browser extension your admin pushes once, never prompts or content, matches each person across tools, and sends one email with every leak priced and the date its fix lands on the bill.

SeatLeak opens to teams in the order they sign up, starting this winter. Until then, the calculator on our home page estimates what your team is likely leaking across all its tools.