Key takeaways:
- Steady is sunsetting seat-based plans by the end of 2026.
- New credit-based plans align the price you pay with value you get from Steady.
- Switch now and get 100 free Coordination Credits for every user already on your account. Reach out to get started, or run the numbers first.
Back in January, we rolled out credit-based pricing for all new accounts. It’s been running quietly in the background ever since, and most of our enterprise customers up for renewal have been opting in — usually because the math worked out in their favor. Now we want to make it official: seat-based pricing is on its way out. Here’s why we made the change and what it means for you.
The problem with seats
We sell a coordination operating system. Coordination gets better the more people there are in the loop. More teams, teammates, stakeholders, cross-functional partners, etc. means fewer context gaps, better alignment, and better teamwork.
But seat-based pricing punishes exactly that. Every person added is a recurring calculation of “is this person going to use it enough to justify the seat?” Cost and value were constantly out of alignment under that model — light accounts overpaying for seats that sat mostly idle, heavy accounts underpaying, the price of admission disconnected from the value Steady was delivering.
Feature-gating — a standard approach in SaaS pricing — made matters worse. You want to use a feature locked behind a gate, but to use it, you need to pay for it for the other 50 people on your account too. High risk, unproven reward, and again, misaligned value.
Per-seat pricing also started to tie our hands in terms of what features we could and couldn’t build. Features like Echoes have variable backend costs, and heavy use can rack up real LLM bills. Under seat pricing, that constraint shaped the product itself — no daily Echo cadence at launch, no realtime chat surface where you could just keep talking, nothing that a single power user could blow up the unit economics on.
None of that was working for customers, or for us. So we designed a new pricing model that aligns our incentives with yours, aligns the price you pay to the value you get, and unshackles our ability to build the best product we can.
How Coordination Credits work
The model we landed on is credit-based. We designed our new pricing model from first principles, but we’re not alone in choosing this approach. Credit and usage-based pricing is the common case for AI-native tools (Lovable, Clay), and more and more seat-based tools are making the switch (Netlify, Render, GitHub).
Here’s how it works. Customers subscribe monthly or yearly to packs of Coordination Credits, which get spent two ways: context deliveries like a Smart Check-in landing in someone’s Daily Digest, and LLM token usage for AI features like Echoes. Deliveries are per-recipient — a check-in delivered to 5 people costs 5 credits. Unused credits roll over for as long as your account is active, so a slow month banks credits for a busy one.
No seat fees; bring your whole team
Where seat-based pricing fought against bringing more people into Steady, credit-based pricing does the opposite. Consider two scenarios: “light” users, and partner teams.
Light users
Under seat-based pricing, light users like stakeholders who need to be kept in the loop on a specific initiative rarely made it into Steady. The “will they use it enough to justify a seat” math didn’t work out. That created redundant coordination labor on top of Steady — more meetings, more report writing, etc. With credits you can just bring them in. They can follow that one goal they care about, set up a single Echo that gives them exactly the context they need, etc. Complete context, zero coordination overhead.
Partner teams
When it comes to partner teams, we’ve heard a consistent refrain of “I want a team we work with to use Steady so that I can keep tabs on what they’re doing, but they’re not sure if it’ll work for them.” Seat-based pricing created a decision cliff, where the partner team had to make a call before Steady’s value was proven. With credit-based pricing, partner teams can start small and expand with confidence. Both teams win.
The throughline in both cases: more of the coordination work that used to happen around Steady — in DMs, recap emails, parallel status meetings — can now happen in it.
Price aligned to value
Credits also give you flexibility at the feature level. One person on your team wants to lean hard on Echoes? They can — no need to bring the rest of the team along, and no upgrade required to “unlock AI” for the whole org. They stop using it next month? Nothing about your plan needs to change. You only spent the credits they actually consumed.
The same flexibility applies as your team grows or contracts. Start on a small pack, upgrade the moment you need more headroom (new credits land instantly), drop back down a tier during a slower stretch. Credits flex with your team’s rhythm.
The bigger point: with seat-based pricing, every tier bakes in assumptions about how a typical account uses every feature, and somebody is always on the wrong side of the average. Credits skip the averages. You pay for the value you get; no more, no less.
Opt into credits
We will begin rolling out plan changes in Q4 2026, but you can also opt in now. If you do want to opt in sooner rather than later, we’ll add 100 bonus credits for every user already on your account.
If you want to estimate how much you’d pay with a credit plan, you can use the credit estimator on our pricing page. For a full breakdown of how credits get used, read the docs.
FAQs
Do credits expire? Coordination Credits don’t expire as long as you maintain an active account. We don’t want people to worry that they’re not getting their money’s worth.
Will I get billed automatically if I run out? No. When you run out of credits, Steady stops deliveries, but keeps collecting updates and activity for up to 7 days.
Can I top off without changing my subscription? Yes — ad-hoc top-offs are there for usage spikes that don’t justify a bigger pack.
Do you charge for users? No, there’s zero cost for adding users. In fact, we give you 100 free credits every time you add a new user to Steady.
If you have more questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.