Pay for the work, not another AI seat

August 20, 2026

A co-founder should not need ChatGPT Plus to see the crew. Decillion bills usage — catalog token rates, computer by the minute, a 5.5% top-up fee — not another seat.

A second human on an AI-staffed project should not cost a second AI subscription. If your partner has to buy ChatGPT Plus to “see what the AI said,” you do not have a team. You have two private chats and a tax for sharing. Decillion is usage-priced: you pay for the work the crew does in a project room, not for another seat every time someone who has to live with the result walks in.

That sounds obvious until you look at how founder-operators actually spend. One person has Plus. The other has Claude. They screenshot. They forward. They each re-prompt the same job because the context never left a personal account. Slack plus ChatGPT is not a team because the stack is a pile. It is also a billing model that charges headcount for software that was supposed to be the crew.

Seats price people. Projects price work.

Per-seat AI is a chat product wearing a team costume. The meter is “how many logins.” The unit of work on Decillion is the project: a brief, a recommended specialist crew, one orbit partners can join. Inviting a co-founder is not a line item. Running agents is. That is the difference between staffing a cafe launch and buying another chatbot for the person who will stand behind the counter.

• Seat: you pay because a person exists. Their access is the product. The work is somewhere else.

• Usage: you pay because a run happened — tokens the model actually used, computer time the sandbox actually burned.

• Project room: the people who must share the outcome sit in the same orbit as the agents. No extra login tax for seeing the brief.

What you actually pay on Decillion

The numbers live on the pricing page and in the product. Three lines matter, and they are not the same thing.

• Wallet top-ups: you add funds. A 5.5% platform fee applies at that moment — $100 paid credits $94.50. That fee is how the platform is funded. It is not a markup on token rates.

• Model tokens: we do not mark up provider list prices. The input and output rates on an agent in the market are what you pay for that model’s tokens — the same public per-million numbers as the provider’s pricing page.

• Computer time: agent runs use a sandboxed computer, billed by the minute (a one-minute minimum on a normal turn), plus a small floor on every billed turn. That line is separate from tokens. A joke can still cost a minute if you start a full run.

Default fallback token rates exist only when an agent has no listed price. A listed specialist’s own rates replace them. None of this is a monthly “AI Slack” for your headcount. Current figures, and cheaper chat commands that skip the sandbox, are on the pricing page.

Why this is cheaper than “buy them Plus”

ChatGPT Plus is a good product for a private thinker. It is a bad way to share a crew. You pay whether the co-founder reads one answer or restates the whole brief. You pay again when a freelancer arrives and you still cannot put them in the thread. The usage bill on a Decillion project follows the work: quiet days are cheap; a real research-and-sandbox push costs what it used. You can read that bill on Costs. You cannot do that with two Plus receipts and a Slack export.

• A partner joining the project does not open a second model subscription.

• You are not guessing which personal chat is the source of truth.

• When you later hire a person into the room, they inherit the orbit, not an invoice for another seat.

What usage pricing is not

It is not “AI is free.” Computer minutes add up. Long history makes input tokens add up. That is honest. The dishonest model is charging you as if every collaborator were a chatbot customer. If you only need a paragraph you will throw away, stay in a chatbot — we said the same in A project room is not another chatbot. If two people have to steer the same launch, do not buy a second brain. Put them in the room and pay for the runs.

How to start without turning it into a prompt hobby

Write an outcome a partner could read — the shape in What to write when you open a Decillion project. Accept a recommended crew or pick specialists. Invite by username. Add wallet funds knowing the 5.5% top-up fee. Then work in the project, not in two Plus tabs. The loop is the same as How it works: brief, crew, shared room, hire in-place when a person is the constraint.