All CodeCharter plans are tiered by the number of developer seats (Starter up to 5, Team up to 10, Business up to 25). To help you choose the right tier when purchasing, here is a precise definition of what counts as a seat and what does not.
What is a seat
One seat license per person who actively uses CodeCharter. Actively means at least one of the following:
- The CLI runs on that person's workstation.
- The VS Code extension is installed on that person's workstation.
- That person regularly commits code to a repository whose pull requests are checked by your CodeCharter integration in CI.
"Regularly" means at least one commit per month as a rule of thumb. One-off contributions from external contributors do not count.
What is not a seat
- CI service accounts. The API key your GitHub Action, GitLab pipeline, Azure pipeline, or similar uses to run CodeCharter is not a separate seat. This is also true if you use multiple service accounts per stage for purely technical reasons.
- Read-only reviewers who review pull requests for content but do not contribute code themselves. Anyone who only reads annotations does not need a seat.
- Engineering managers and product owners who do not commit code.
- QA testers who do not commit code.
- External contractors who contribute a one-off pull request.
Rule of thumb: only someone who writes code or whose machine calls CodeCharter directly is a seat.
What happens if you exceed the threshold?
We do not enforce this technically. You commit in the terms and conditions to switching to the appropriate plan promptly when you reach the next tier. You make the switch yourself in the portal under /account/billing — Stripe prorates the difference for the remainder of the period. More at Plan overview and Cancellation and plan change.
If you are unsure whether you are just below or just above the threshold, feel free to write to us at [email protected]. We will review it together and suggest the appropriate plan.
Audit and fairness
We assume you classify honestly. There is no technical telemetry that silently counts seats — the CLI sends no data back, and neither does the VS Code extension. The API key for CI does not know how many developers commit to the repository either.
The only verification happens on your side when you honestly select the tier on a plan change. We trust you to do this, and if someone abuses that trust it is a commercial matter, not a technical one.