Apr 10, 2026 · Brandon
Consumption Pricing, in Plain English
Seat pricing punishes growth and hides waste. Here is how consumption billing works at Forge, and why it maps to how service businesses actually operate.
Seat pricing was designed for office software. One desk, one license, one user. It does not describe a dispatch office with three planners, twenty-two techs, and a weekend that looks nothing like a Tuesday.
At Forge, the base subscription covers the platform — logins, the core app, support. Everything that has a real variable cost is billed against what you actually used:
- SMS notifications, per message.
- GPS pings, per device per day.
- Photo and document storage, per gigabyte.
- Automated route optimisation, per run.
A quiet January produces a smaller invoice than a flat-out July. That is the feature.
The counter-argument is that customers like predictability. Fair — so we publish a usage dashboard, budget alerts, and monthly caps. Predictable when you want it; elastic when you need it.