Copilot, Cursor or Claude Code: the seat bill for 100 developers

The seat is the smallest number on the invoice

GitHub's documentation states the prices plainly: Copilot Business is $19 per granted seat a month and Copilot Enterprise is $39 per granted seat a month. Both include a monthly allowance of GitHub AI credits, with Enterprise carrying the larger pool and the enterprise controls that come with GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

Cursor's pricing page puts Teams at $30 or more a user a month, with pooled usage described as 4 to 50 times the Plus plan depending on the seat tier, and adds that third-party model usage is not included in the monthly price and must be purchased separately at API list price. Claude Code does not sell a seat in the same sense: Anthropic's documentation states that it charges by API token consumption, and that on Claude for Teams and Enterprise plans usage draws from each member's seat allowance.

Three products, three units. One sells a seat with a credit allowance, one sells a seat with a pooled usage multiplier and a separate model bill, and one sells tokens with an optional allowance. A comparison that lines up the headline seat prices is comparing different things.

What the caps do to a 100-developer forecast

Copilot's cap is a monthly allowance of AI credits, with one credit priced at $0.01 and a dollar budget that an administrator sets for usage beyond the allowance. That makes the worst case bounded and visible: a team that exhausts its credits stops or continues against a number someone chose, not against an open-ended invoice.

Cursor's cap is a pooled allowance across the team, which is better for a team with a few heavy users and worse for budgeting per person, because one developer's agent runs consume the pool everyone shares. The model bill sits outside that pool for third-party models, so the variable cost has two sources.

Claude Code's cap is the spend limit an organisation sets, applied per member or across the organisation, with usage credits that can be switched on when a plan limit is reached. Its published average is the number to plan against: around $13 per developer per active day and $150 to $250 per developer per month across enterprise deployments, with costs below $30 per active day for 90% of users. That is a distribution with a long tail, not a seat price.

The bill for 100 developers

The grid converts each pricing model into the same twelve-month question for a 100-developer team at list, before discounts. The Claude Code column uses Anthropic's own published average rather than a negotiated rate, which is the only comparable figure the vendor publishes.

Where each one breaks

Copilot Enterprise assumes GitHub Enterprise Cloud; GitHub states the plan is not available for GitHub Enterprise Server. An engineering organisation that runs GitHub Enterprise Server on its own infrastructure cannot buy the enterprise tier at all, which removes it from the shortlist before price is discussed.

Cursor's risk is the model bill. A $30 seat with third-party models at API list price can double when a team standardises on an expensive model for agent work, and the pooled allowance hides which team spent it unless the usage analytics are read monthly. Cursor's Enterprise tier adds SCIM and granular spend controls that Teams does not, so the controls that make the spend predictable are the ones one tier up.

Claude Code's risk is variance. A published average of $150 to $250 per developer a month with 90% of users below $30 per active day means a small number of developers can carry a large share of the bill. The product is cheapest for teams that run it in short, intense sessions and most expensive for teams that leave long agent runs working all day.

The rule for 50 to 200 developers

Below 50 developers, Copilot Business at $19 is the default because the enterprise controls rarely justify double the seat price and the credit allowance is enough to learn on. Between 50 and 200, the decision splits by workflow rather than by vendor preference.

If the team works inside GitHub and the requirement is governance, audit and a predictable cap, Copilot Enterprise at $39 is the cheapest way to give 100 developers a governed assistant: $46,800 a year at list. If the team works in an editor-first agent workflow across several models, Cursor Teams at $36,000 plus model usage is the better fit, provided someone owns the model bill. If the work is terminal-heavy and the team already pays Anthropic, Claude Code at $180,000 to $300,000 for the same 100 developers is a deliberate premium that has to be justified by output rather than by seat economics.

The mistake at this size is buying one product for everyone. A 100-developer team usually has 60 people who want completion and chat, 25 who want agentic editing and 15 who want long-running autonomous work. Three populations, three cost curves, and a mixed fleet is often cheaper than one enterprise tier applied to all of them.

What to write into the renewal

Ask for the allowance in units the invoice uses. For Copilot that is credits and dollars, for Cursor it is the pool and the model list price, for Claude Code it is the spend limit and the token rates. A vendor that answers in seat counts has not answered the question.

Then set the two controls that stop a pilot becoming a surprise. Copilot and Cursor both let an administrator cap spend, and Claude Code lets an organisation set a limit per member or across the organisation. A pilot of 20 developers run for a quarter against those limits produces the only forecast that matters: the team's own consumption, priced at the vendor's own rate, before the enterprise agreement is signed.