What one account seat costs

A price tag answers one question and hides four. Holding one account apart costs hardware, memory, power, licences and hours.

• Hardware

  Bought once, replaced when it dies.

• Memory and disk

  What an open account holds, and what it leaves behind.

• Power and space

  Anything switched on draws current and takes a desk.

• Licences

  A guest system, a network subscription or the tool itself.

• Hours

  Setup, switching, waiting for a boot, keeping copies current.

A second laptop has no monthly line, so the day after purchase it reads as free. Its cost is paid in another currency: the price spread over its working life, the current it draws, the spare kept for the day it fails.

The hour is the part most people underestimate. One device you pick up out of habit, and fifty is a job of its own.

• Purchase

  Spread across the years the device stays usable.

• Its own route out

  A separate line or SIM, or the device loses its point.

• Replacement

  A device that dies takes its signed in sessions with it.

• Attention

  Charging and updating, times every device you hold.

Every method that opens a real browser per account meets the memory of the machine underneath. You do not get that ceiling by guesswork: it is computed from your machine's memory, with a share left to the system.

Yours will land between four and thirty two, and on the Engine screen you can set your own.

The line item here is a profile, not a machine and not a person. Machines are billed separately, so moving your work to a second computer costs you no profiles.

The free plan carries two profiles on the same engine the paid plans run. The honest test of this axis costs nothing to start.

• A profile

  One seat: own storage, own readings, own route out.

• A device seat

  A computer allowed to sign in, counted apart.

• A team seat

  A colleague with their own login and a role.

• The exit address

  Bought from a provider, never part of a seat here.

An empty cell means the line does not exist for that method, not that it costs nothing. A tool that never offered to separate accounts has no seat to price.

The last row is ours, and you can check all of it yourself. No cell carries anyone else's price.

Cost per seat matters less than the slope. Hardware rises in a straight line, a guest system rises in memory, and a profile rises by a row in a table.

The slope decides where a plan stops working. Fifty accounts is fifty machines to buy, power and replace.

The cheapest correct tool is the one to take, and for a throwaway login that is the window already open. Nothing here argues otherwise.

A paid seat earns its price where accounts must last, stay apart and open again tomorrow.

• One throwaway login

  Incognito costs nothing and forgets on purpose.

• A whole machine's traffic

  A subscription reaches apps that are not browsers.

• Walls deeper than a process

  A guest system has its own kernel.

• An account worth more than a laptop

  Give it a laptop and pay knowingly.