Why we won't chase seats.

The consumer AI vendors all have a business tier now, and they all price it higher per seat than the consumer product. ChatGPT Business is $25/user/month on an annual commitment. Claude Team is $30 monthly or $25 annual. Copilot for Business is $19/user. The convention is: consumer product minus a few features, plus admin controls, times more dollars per person.

LADLE for business is the exact same product at the exact same price. $20/user/month, no annual commitment, no minimum seat count, no per-seat markup. Buy one seat or five hundred; same price per user.

We give up money doing this. If we'd priced business at $25/seat we'd make an extra $5 × business subscriber every month. At even 5% business mix at scale, that's real revenue we're leaving on the table.

Two reasons we do it anyway.

First, we already earmark $8 of every $20 for WFP. Charging $25 to businesses would either raise the meal count for their subscribers (creating a two-tier meal donation that fractures the marketing) or increase our margin (which we already say is fixed at ~$3.50/subscriber). Neither is honest. The uniform price protects the uniform meal promise.

Second, the industry price ladder for business AI reflects features consumer plans don't get — admin dashboards, audit logs, SSO, data controls, procurement contracts. We ship those to everyone. Every LADLE subscriber gets the same data controls, the same export tools, the same account security. There's no locked door for the business tier to unlock. Charging more for the same product would be dishonest markup.

What businesses do get that solo users don't: an impact report on demand (PDF, CSV, or JSON, dated and referenced) that the CFO or CSR team can hand to a stakeholder. That report is a real deliverable, not a feature we invented for tier justification. It costs us $0 to generate — it reads from the same ledger the receipts page reads from — so charging for it would be strange.

We also don't do a minimum seat count. Some vendors require 2 or 5 seats for business features to unlock. Doesn't apply here — a two-person company gets the same product and the same impact report as a five-hundred-person one, with the same $20/seat price and the same $8/seat/month to WFP.

The loss here is real: we're smaller than we could be with a business-tier upcharge. The gain is that the deal is clean. "LADLE for business" isn't a bigger version of LADLE. It's LADLE, ordered on a company card, with a report on request.

If we ever do add a business-only feature that costs meaningful money to run (a dedicated Slack integration, single-sign-on with a niche IDP, a compliance certification), we'll price it as an add-on, not as a per-seat multiplier. The base subscription stays $20.