Obsidian Human-Seat Pricing Model

This pricing model is a way to keep seat based SaaS security economics intact while the number of machine identities explodes. Security teams still budget around employees, not bots, service accounts, or MCP connected agents, so charging on protected human users gives Obsidian a stable contract unit while letting the product watch a much larger graph of tokens, integrations, OAuth grants, and agent actions behind each employee account.

• In practice, one employee can spawn many monitored entities, a Slack bot, a Salesforce integration, an API token, or an AI agent with inherited app permissions. Obsidian positions these as identities to discover and govern, but does not force pricing to rise one for one with each new machine actor.
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• This mirrors how adjacent security tools often sell against a simple human based unit even when underlying activity is larger. Email security commonly prices per protected mailbox, not per phishing attempt or API event, because buyers want contracts that map to headcount and renewal planning.
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• The strategic tradeoff is that value creation shifts toward non human coverage over time. As bigger vendors bundle agent governance, identity controls, and SaaS monitoring into broader platform deals, Obsidian needs the human seat to act as the commercial wedge while machine visibility expands product scope and deal size.
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The next step is a broader identity security contract where the employee seat is only the entry point. As AI agents become routine workers inside SaaS apps, vendors that already map every human account to its connected tokens, apps, and agent actions will be in position to turn seat based pricing into a larger control plane sale.