What a seat costs and what it lets you do are two questions.
A tool sells seats. Permissions decide what someone may do with one. Driply records them as separate facts, so your spend stays right and your access review stays honest.
Most access tools keep one number per person per tool and call it a seat. Real vendors don’t work that way. HubSpot sells a Core seat and a Sales Hub seat at different prices, and a permission set on top that costs nothing. Figma bills a Full seat and a Dev seat. Squeeze that into one field and either your spend is wrong or your permissions are.
In Driply a Tool sells one or more seat types, each with its own price and how many you purchased. Access levels are a separate axis that says what a person may do. A Grant can hold several of each, so the register describes what you actually bought and what you actually granted.
One tool, several seats
A tool records every seat it sells, each with its own price and purchased count. A person can hold more than one, a Core seat plus a Sales Hub seat, and what that person costs is the sum, not an average.
Permission is its own axis
Access levels say what someone may do. A level can be free while the seat is expensive, and changing what someone may do never silently changes what you pay. That is the point of keeping them apart.
More than one level per person
A grant holds a base level plus any extra rights on top, so a banking tool can give everyone the standard level and add “transfer money” to a few. “Who can move money?” becomes a query rather than a hunt through level names.
Numbers Driply will not invent
A seat nobody recorded is reported as a gap, never priced at a guessed rate. A price with no billing cycle is reported as unestimable rather than quietly assumed monthly. Capacity warns when you are over what you purchased, and never blocks the approval.
Why one seat number was never enough
The moment a tool sells more than one seat tier, a per-seat average stops being true. Ten people on a $20 seat and two on a $90 seat is not twelve people at $32. Get that wrong and every downstream number is wrong with it: what a team costs, what a tool costs, what you would recover by reclaiming a license.
Conflating cost with permission also breaks governance in the other direction. If the only way to record “this person costs more” is to move them to a different access level, then your levels stop describing rights and start describing invoices, and an access review can no longer answer what someone may actually do.
Keeping them separate makes both answers cheap. Spend reads seat types and their prices. Access reviews and the privileged report read levels, including the extra ones held on top of a base, so a right granted as an addition is never invisible to the review that exists to find it. Seat types are available on Business and up.
The result, Spend that reflects what you bought, and access levels that still mean what they say.
Questions, answered.
- What is a seat type?
- What a tool actually sells, with its own price and purchased count: a HubSpot Core seat, a Sales Hub seat, a Figma Dev seat. A tool can sell several, and a person can hold more than one at once.
- How is a seat different from an access level?
- A seat is what you pay. An access level is what the person may do. They vary independently in real tools, so Driply records them as two facts rather than one, and changing either never quietly changes the other.
- Can someone hold more than one access level?
- Yes. A grant carries a base level plus any extra rights on top. It is how a tool where everyone shares a standard seat can still give a few people an elevated right, without inventing a separate level for every combination.
- What happens if I have not recorded a seat or a price yet?
- Driply says so instead of guessing. An unseated grant is surfaced as a gap rather than charged at a made-up rate, and a price with no billing cycle is reported as unestimable rather than assumed to be monthly.