When software was a fixed tool, seat-based pricing made sense. You bought chairs at a table. Everyone paid the same whether they logged in once a week or built their entire workflow around it. The misalignment was tolerable because the capability was static. But AI products aren’t tools anymore. They’re capabilities that scale with model intelligence. The gap between Claude Sonnet 3.x and 4.x shows why flat pricing becomes a trap: a user extracting 100x more value pays the same as someone…