Most enterprise software is priced per seat: you pay for each person who logs in. It made sense when software was a tool a person used. It makes far less sense for a Digital Worker, which is not a tool your team logs into, but something that does a defined piece of work itself. So we price differently. You pay for the workers doing the job, not for seats. This is the first in a short series on what our Digital Workers are, and it starts with the pricing model, because the model reveals the thinking behind the product.
Why per-seat pricing doesn't fit
Per-seat pricing measures the wrong thing for this kind of software. A Digital Worker reading incoming inquiries or drafting service responses doesn't get more valuable because more of your staff have a login. Its value is in the work it does, not in how many people can open a dashboard. Charging per seat would either punish you for giving the whole team visibility, or quietly push you toward hiding the tool behind a couple of accounts. Both are the wrong incentive.
What "a worker" means as a unit
A Digital Worker is scoped to a job, the way you'd scope a role when hiring. One worker reads drawings and extracts parameters for quoting. Another triages service tickets against your documentation. You add a worker when there's a job for it to do, not when another person needs access. Everyone on your team can see and use the output; the unit you pay for is the work, not the headcount around it.
Why this fits manufacturing right now
European manufacturers are short of people. Engineering and skilled roles are hard to fill, and the gap is widening, not closing. In that context, a model that charges per human seat feels backwards: you're already struggling to put people in seats. Pricing by the work a Digital Worker does maps onto how you actually think about capacity, which task needs covering, not how many logins to buy.
What this is not
To be clear, this is not a claim that a Digital Worker replaces a person. It does a defined, repetitive slice of work and hands the judgment back to your team, a point we'll come back to later in this series. "Workers not seats" is about how you pay and how you reason about capacity, not a promise to cut headcount. If anything, it's built for the opposite situation: teams that can't hire fast enough and need the routine work covered so their people can do the work that needs a person.
Where this series goes next
This was the model. The next parts look at what a Digital Worker is as part of a team, how it works on your own data, and, importantly, what it deliberately won't do. If you'd rather talk it through against your own processes than read the whole series, that's the faster route.