Client Seats Explained: What They Cost and What They Cannot Do
A client seat is Dock-only: it gives someone outside your team access to review drafts, leave pin comments, approve items into the Library and raise new requests, with no visibility into agent chats, missions or internal team notes. On the Team plan it costs $79/mo per seat plus a $49/mo Dock add-on if you have not already switched the Dock on; on the Agency plan it costs $49/mo per seat because the Dock is already included; on Founder it is not available at all, because Founder is capped at one seat with no extra seats to buy.
What a client seat actually is
The Dock is the client-facing review surface inside Orbitable. Whoever holds a client seat sees only what has been put in front of them: work waiting for review, drafts they can mark up with pins, an approval action that moves a piece into the Library, and a way to raise new requests with an SLA target attached. That is the entire surface. There is no agent chat, no mission list, no world model, no credit balance, nothing else.
This is deliberate rather than a stripped-down trial of the full product. A client seat is not a cheaper version of a team seat that happens to hide some menus, it is a different kind of access built for one job: giving an outside party a controlled way to see work and respond to it.
What a client seat cannot do
Internal team notes are never visible to a client, on any plan. That is a hard boundary, not a permission you can toggle. Beyond notes, a client seat also cannot:
- Open the Dispatcher or talk to any of the 50 specialist agents directly
- See or edit the shared world model (ICP, brand voice, products, competitors, knowledge base)
- Start, pause or reassign a mission
- View credit consumption or plan usage
- Approve Autopilot's weekly plan (that approval happens in the Dock, but only for people with authority over the account, not a bare client seat)
What a client seat generates is requests, and those requests carry the same SLA targets as any other work item. Reviewing and marking up drafts never costs credits, on any plan. Credits are only spent when an agent does the work the client asked for, not when the client looks at it.
What it costs on each plan
The Dock add-on fee is a one-time, plan-wide switch, not something you pay per seat. Once it is on for a Team account, every additional seat you buy, client or otherwise, costs the standard $79/mo extra-seat rate with nothing further added for Dock access.
Founder, Team and Agency: the seat economics
Founder is built around a single operator running one world with no room to add anyone else. Its 1 seat and inability to buy extra seats mean there is no configuration in which a Founder account gets a client into the Dock without first upgrading. If bringing a client into review is the reason you are looking at seats, Founder is not the plan to start from.
Team changes the maths but not the structure. You get 5 seats and can buy more at $79/seat/mo, and Dock is still a $49/mo add-on rather than a default. The practical result: the first client seat on a Team plan that has not yet turned on the Dock costs $79/mo (the seat) plus $49/mo (the switch), and every seat after that is $79/mo on its own.
Agency inverts this. Dock comes included, so there is no separate switch-on cost to budget for, and the extra-seat price drops to $49/mo. An agency running several client accounts on one Agency plan is paying a flat $49/mo per additional client, seat for seat, with the review surface already live. That is the economics the plan is built around: 10 seats and 25 worlds included, aimed at agencies running multiple client engagements from a single account rather than one team running one world.
How seats are counted
A seat is consumed the moment someone is invited, not the moment they log in. The seat count on every plan includes the account owner and any pending invites, so sending an invite to a client and having them ignore it for a week still occupies a seat the whole time. If you are close to your seat limit, check pending invites before assuming you have room, because an unanswered invite counts exactly the same as an active user.
This matters most on Team, where the jump from included seats to paid extra seats is a real line item at $79/mo each. On Agency, with 10 seats included and a $49/mo top-up rate, the same miscount is a smaller cost but still worth tracking if you are running several client Docks off one account.
FAQ
Can a client seat access the agent chat or missions?
No. A client seat only opens the Dock: incoming drafts, pin comments, approvals into the Library, and new requests. Agent chat, mission management and the world model are not visible from a client seat, on any plan.
Does giving a client access to the Dock cost credits?
No. Credits meter the work agents do, and reviewing work never costs credits. A client raising a request or approving a draft in the Dock does not touch your credit balance; credits are only spent when an agent acts on that request.
Can I add a client seat on the Founder plan?
No. Founder includes 1 seat and does not allow extra seats to be purchased, so there is no way to add a client seat without upgrading to Team or Agency first.
What happens if I invite a client but they never accept?
The seat is still counted as used. Seat totals on every plan include the account owner and any pending invites, so an unaccepted invite occupies a seat the same as an active user does.
Is the Dock included on every plan?
No. The Dock is included by default on Agency and Enterprise. On Founder and Team it is a $49/mo add-on that has to be switched on before any seat, client or otherwise, can use it.