Seat tax (CMS pricing)

Seat tax is CMS pricing that charges for each human login. It made sense when the product was an editorial room. It trains teams to ration accounts the moment an agency, a contractor, or an agent needs access.

Agents do not sit in seats. Neither do public APIs. If the real operators are MCP, embed, and REST, metering humans is the wrong axis. You end up paying for people who click and hiding the machines that actually write.

A Backend Platform should price the surface you run. LUNO Free, Solo, Standard, and Business are per site. Agency Workspace is per organization. That maps to sites you ship and orgs that hold many sites — not to how many editors you can afford to invite.

Seat tax also leaks into compare shopping. Enterprise CMS quotes look cheap per feature until seats and spaces stack. Read the public matrix on /pricing and /pricing.md before you treat a “free hobby tier” as the real number.

Stay on seat pricing if your whole workflow is human editors in one admin. Switch when agents, APIs, and multi-site ops are the work — and you do not want to meter that work as logins.