How to find unused ChatGPT and Claude seats

Why idle AI seats pile up

AI seats get bought fast and reviewed rarely. Someone tries the tool for a week, a contractor leaves, an invite is never accepted, and the seat keeps billing. Across all SaaS, Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index found that organizations leave 36% of their licenses unused on average. The same report names ChatGPT as the most expensed application, so some of your AI spend may not even run through the company workspace.

What an idle seat costs

USD, billed annually / billed monthly. List prices as of October 2026, from the ChatGPT Business release notes and claude.com/pricing.

An idle Standard seat costs $240 a year on annual billing; an idle Premium seat costs $1,200. In both tools, taking it off the bill is two steps: remove the person, then reduce the paid seat count.

Finding them in ChatGPT Business

Workspace analytics has a member-level table with each member’s seat type, credits spent and messages sent, over 7 days, 1 month, 6 months, 12 months or a custom range.

1. Choose the last month and look for members with zero or almost zero messages sent. Go by messages, not credits: OpenAI notes that zero credit spend doesn’t mean nobody used ChatGPT, because seats use their included allowance first.
2. Switch to the 6-month view before you act, to catch people on leave or with seasonal work.
3. Remove the members you confirm. That frees their seats for someone else but doesn’t reduce the paid seat count.
4. Schedule a seat reduction. It takes effect at the start of the next billing cycle; seats already committed for the current cycle aren’t refunded.

Finding them in Claude Team

Owners see weekly active members and a chart of active members against assigned seats under Settings, then Analytics, filterable by product. That tells you how many seats are idle, not whose.

1. Export the spend report (up to 90 days, rows per user email and model) and look for members with no requests. Anthropic notes that on some plan types the report only reflects spend beyond the seat allotment, so check that your active members appear in it before you read a missing name as an idle seat.
2. For developers, the Claude Code dashboard exports contribution data for every user as CSV.
3. Remove the members you confirm, then schedule the seat reduction. It takes effect at your next renewal, the annual renewal date on annual plans, with no prorated refund.

What the consoles don’t show

• The other tool. Someone with seats in both ChatGPT and Claude who only uses one looks active in one console and idle in the other, and neither console knows about the other.
• Personal plans on company cards. An expensed personal subscription never appears in a workspace admin console.
• Leavers on Claude Team. Automatic provisioning (SCIM) is an Enterprise feature, so on Team someone has to remove leavers by hand.
• The deadline. Reductions only land at the next cycle or renewal, so the clean-up has to happen before that date, not after.

How SeatLeak automates it

SeatLeak checks every day instead of once a year. It lists seats idle for 45 days or more and invites nobody accepted, across ChatGPT, Claude and the other tools on your card, and flags every seat a leaver still holds the day after offboarding. Members whose browser doesn’t run the extension show as unknown, never as unused. Once a month you get one email with each seat to release, its price and the date the reduction lands.

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.