Three vendors in three days redefined the seat as a credit allowance instead of killing it.

GitLab attached 12 credits to a Premium seat and 24 to an Ultimate seat with enforceable per-user caps on September 17, plus background exports covering 31 days with one row per billable event including session ID, namespace, LLM call count, token totals and models used. GitLab HubSpot began piloting seats-and-credits in the Nordics and Benelux the same day and told analysts the two are complementary layers. The "seats are dead, outcomes win" transition is not what shipped. What shipped is a hybrid where the seat survives as the entitlement envelope and the credit meters the agent inside it. The contract shape stays intact and the variable cost moves to a line no procurement team has a baseline for. GitLab's version has teeth: hitting the subscription cap suspends credit-consuming features for everyone until the next billing period.