Per-Seat SaaS Billing, Decoded: How to Audit Seats and Actually Cancel a Team Plan

A team plan bills one person — the workspace owner — and nothing a departing member does to their own account will stop that charge. That single fact breaks most cancellation advice on the internet, which assumes the person paying and the person using the account are the same human. On a per-seat plan they usually are not, and the gap between the two is where money leaks.

This is a walkthrough of how per-seat billing actually works at four tools a small team is likely to run: Canva Business, Figma Professional, GitHub Copilot Business and 1Password. Each one answers the same four questions differently — who is billed, what happens when someone joins mid-cycle, what you get back when someone leaves, and what order you have to do things in. At the end there is a seat audit sheet that names an owner and a review date for every paid seat, which is the part that stops this happening twice.

Last reviewed: September 13, 2026. Every price and billing rule below was read from the vendor's own pricing page or help centre and is linked next to the claim. Vendors show regional currencies: Canva and GitHub figures are the published US dollar list prices, Figma and 1Password figures are shown in both currencies where the vendor publishes them. Seat mechanics change more often than headline prices — check the linked page before acting on a number.

The Bill Has One Name On It

Every per-seat plan resolves to a single billing identity, and only that identity can shrink the bill:

• Canva. The team owner or admin. Canva's cancellation page lists "you're not in the team with the subscription" as one of the standard reasons a cancellation attempt fails, and instructs you to switch teams under your profile icon first. It also notes that after a team plan is cancelled, "the team admin remains the account owner".
• Figma. Team admins on the Professional plan; organisation admins on Organization and Enterprise. Ordinary members can request a seat, but only an admin can approve, downgrade or remove one.
• GitHub Copilot Business. The organisation, managed from the org's Settings → Billing & licensing → Licensing, or Settings → Copilot → Access.
• 1Password. The account owner and whoever holds billing permissions, from the admin console rather than any individual's app.

The practical consequence is uncomfortable. A designer who resigns can delete their Figma account, uninstall everything and never log in again, and the seat carries on billing until an admin touches it. A contractor whose engagement ended in April is still a line item in September unless someone removed them. And if the person who set up the workspace is the one who left, the subscription outlives everyone's ability to cancel it — which is why transferring workspace ownership belongs on an offboarding checklist next to the laptop and the door fob.

If you are running the wider audit rather than one tool, the small-business software audit covers the inventory step that comes before this one.

What a Mid-Cycle Seat Actually Costs

"Prorated" is used loosely enough to be useless. In practice these four vendors do four different things when a person accepts an invitation on the 12th of the month.

Prices checked on the vendors' own pages on August 28, 2026: Canva's Business launch announcement, Figma's pricing page, GitHub's Copilot licence documentation and 1Password's business pricing page.

The Figma annual-term trap

One line in Figma's pricing FAQ deserves its own paragraph: "If you add new paid seats to your team during your annual subscription term, Figma charges you a separate monthly subscription for those seats at the monthly price." And then: "You will continue to get monthly invoices for newly added seats unless you proactively add those seats to your annual subscription or remove the seats."

Read that as arithmetic. You negotiated an annual plan at $16 per Full seat per month. You hire someone in month four. That seat costs $20 a month — 25% more — and it arrives on a second, separate invoice that renews monthly and never lines up with your annual renewal date. Two hires later you have three billing streams for one design team, and the annual renewal you diarised only covers the original seats. Folding those seats into the annual subscription is a deliberate action nobody takes by accident.

Canva's quarterly invoice on a yearly plan

Canva's yearly Business plan has a shape that surprises people: "You pay every year, but we'll send you a bill every three months." Additions in the last three months show up on the next quarterly bill, and Canva emails or notifies you three days before that bill so you can review the team. If you have ever wondered why a Canva charge appeared in a month you were not expecting one, that quarterly rhythm is usually the answer — Canva's own help page lists the descriptors as Canva, Canva*invoice_id, APPLE*Canva and GOOGLE*Canva, which is exactly the kind of line our billing descriptor decoder exists to translate.

Seats have credit allowances now

The 2026 wrinkle is that a seat is no longer just access — it carries an AI credit allowance. Figma attaches 3,000 AI credits a month to a Full seat and 500 to Dev and Collab seats; GitHub lists 1,900 AI credits per user per month on Copilot Business. That means an idle seat is wasting an allowance as well as a licence fee, and it means the renewal date you care about is not always the billing date. We pulled that distinction apart in when to cancel a credit-based AI plan.

The Orphan-Seat Calculation

An orphan seat is a paid seat with nobody behind it: the contractor whose project ended, the employee who left, the "we'll need this for the redesign" seat from a redesign that shipped in spring. Nobody cancels it because nobody owns it.

Here is what one orphan seat costs if it goes unnoticed for four months. These are illustrative calculations using the list prices above, not measured customer data — a team paying different rates should substitute its own.

Two conclusions fall out of that table. First, the vendor's refund policy decides how urgent the audit is: on Copilot every day of delay is spent money, on 1Password Business a suspension on the day someone leaves costs you nothing at all. Second, on a flat pack there is no orphan-seat problem until you cross the tier boundary — which is its own trap, because the eleventh hire is the expensive one.

Before you cancel outright, check whether the vendor sells a pause. Canva lets you pause a Pro, Teams or Business plan for up to three months with no charges during the pause, and on an annual plan you can pause if you are less than two months from renewal. That is rarer than it sounds; when we checked all 49 services in our database for a real billing pause, only a handful offered one.

Doing It in the Wrong Order

Team plans punish sequence errors in a way personal subscriptions never do, because the thing you are cancelling holds other people's work.

Removing a Canva member can delete their designs

Canva's member removal dialog offers two buttons, and they are not equivalent. Transfer designs and remove from team keeps the work and requires ownership transfer to be enabled. Remove from team only removes "the member and their designs completely". Canva is explicit that people removed from a team lose access to the designs they created in it immediately. Cancelling is the gentler case: the workspace drops to Canva Free and all designs, Brand Kit content and shared folders are retained. Removal is the step that destroys work, so download or transfer before you press it.

Figma will lock a team you downgrade too fast

Cancelling a Figma Professional subscription downgrades the team to free Starter at the end of the billing period — it does not delete it. But Starter allows three Figma Design and Figma Sites files in a folder, and one folder in total. Figma's downgrade guidance is blunt about exceeding either limit: too many files and it prevents you from editing them; more than one folder and it locks the team. Published Figma Sites are unpublished automatically. Move or export files and collapse folders before you cancel, not after you notice you cannot edit.

GitHub Copilot is cancelled by emptying it

There is no separate cancel button for an organisation's Copilot Business plan in the usual sense. GitHub's documentation states that removing all assigned Copilot seats in your organisation will cancel the organisation's plan; the flow is Settings → Billing & licensing → Licensing (or Copilot → Access), set Copilot Business to Disabled, then confirm and remove seats. If you unassign a seat the user keeps Copilot until the end of the cycle; if you revoke it, access ends immediately. Choose deliberately — for a departing employee, revoke; for a role change, unassign.

Deleting a 1Password account destroys the Employee vault

1Password documents the offboarding order for a reason: transfer work items into shared vaults and personal items out to their own account, then suspend, then rotate the credentials they had access to, then delete. Deleting an account permanently removes anything saved in that person's Employee vault with no recovery. Suspending first is free — suspended people are not billed — so there is no financial reason to rush to delete.

App-store team plans have to be moved before they can grow

If a Canva plan was bought through the App Store or Google Play, adding members can require cancelling the Apple or Google subscription and re-upgrading through the web. That is a full billing migration, not a settings change, and the cancellation has to happen in the store rather than in Canva. The platform-by-platform cancellation guide covers the store-level steps for both.

Four Exact Screen Paths

Canva, Figma, 1Password and GitHub Copilot are four of the 49 services SubBuddy keeps cancellation steps for, so these paths are ones we maintain rather than ones we looked up once.

Canva Business or Teams

1. Audit the roster. Profile icon → Settings → People. Canva notes that each new team member uses one paid seat, so this page is the bill in list form.
2. Remove departed members. Use the Team role dropdown next to a person → Remove from team, choosing Transfer designs if their work matters. Check whether your team discovery setting still allows anyone at your domain to request to join. It is Canva's default, and it is how rosters grow without anyone deciding to grow them.
3. Cancel or pause. Profile icon → Settings → Billing → Cancel plan → Continue cancellation. The pause option lives inside that same flow.
4. Know what is permanent. Legacy Canva Teams cannot be resubscribed to once cancelled; Canva now sells Business instead. If you are on old Teams pricing, cancelling is a one-way door.

Figma Professional

1. Fix the approval setting first. Admin → Settings → Billing → Seat approval settings. The three options are manual approval for everything, manual approval unless a seat is already available (the default), and auto-approve, which buys a new seat when none is free. Most surprise seats come from the third setting.
2. Right-size the seat types. Not everyone needs a Full seat. Dev, Collab and free View seats exist precisely so that a stakeholder who comments twice a month is not billed like a designer.
3. Reclaim, do not just remove. Moving someone to a View seat earns no refund, but the paid seat is available for someone else for the rest of the period. Use it before the period ends.
4. Cancel from Admin → Settings → Cancel plan, after moving files so the Starter limits do not lock you out.

GitHub Copilot Business

1. Profile picture → Organizations → your organisation → Settings.
2. Billing & licensing → Licensing, or Copilot → Access.
3. Search the member, tick their checkbox, choose Cancel seat, confirm with Remove seats.
4. To end the plan entirely, set Copilot Business to Disabled and confirm removing all seats.

1Password Teams or Business

1. Sign in to the admin console as an owner or someone with billing permissions.
2. Open the person's details page → More Actions → Suspend. Billing stops for suspended people; access does too, and it is reversible.
3. Complete the transfer and credential rotation before deleting the account.
4. On the Teams Starter Pack, confirm whether removing anyone changes the bill at all before you spend time on it.

The Seat Audit Sheet

The reason orphan seats survive is that seats have no owner. A subscription has an owner — someone approved the purchase. A seat inside it does not, so nobody feels responsible for the eleventh one. The fix is one row per seat, not one row per tool.

Set each review date ahead of the vendor's renewal rather than on it — for annual plans, far enough ahead to actually reduce the count at renewal. Our lead-time table for renewal reminders has the offsets, and the 21-column subscription spreadsheet has the schema if you would rather keep this in a sheet than a tracker. Whatever holds it, run it twice a year and after every departure. If you deduct software as a business expense, the same sheet doubles as your evidence trail.

One warning about tooling: a bank-linked tracker cannot see any of this. It sees a single charge from one vendor, not that the charge covers six seats and one of them belongs to someone who left in March. Seat-level tracking is manual by nature, which is why SubBuddy keeps it that way — you record what you are actually paying for, not what a transaction feed can infer.

Sources and Scope

Everything above was read from vendor documentation on August 28, 2026. Where a vendor did not document a behaviour, this post says so rather than filling the gap.

• Canva: how pricing and billing work for Canva Business — quarterly invoicing on yearly plans, the three-day cutoff before a billing date, and the reminder to review your team.
• Canva: cancel a Canva plan — the cancellation path, the pause option, what happens to a team and its designs, and why legacy Teams cancellations are permanent.
• Canva: add or remove people in a team — the seat-per-member rule and the two different removal buttons.
• Canva: pause a Canva plan — the three-month pause with no charges, and the two-month window on annual plans.
• Figma pricing FAQ — the separate monthly subscription for seats added during an annual term.
• Figma: manage billing on the Professional plan — proration on approval, and no prorated refund for a downgrade to a View seat.
• Figma: seat approval settings — the three approval modes and which one buys seats automatically.
• Figma: upgrade or downgrade your plan — Starter file and folder limits, the editing lock, and published Sites being unpublished.
• GitHub: Copilot licence changes — pro rata charges on additions, no refunds on removals, unassign versus revoke.
• GitHub: cancelling Copilot for your organization — cancelling by removing all assigned seats.
• GitHub: plans for Copilot — the $19 per seat per month price and the 1,900 AI credits per user included with Business.
• 1Password: subscription billing policy — prorated charges within 48 hours of acceptance, and no charge for suspended, deleted or never-joined people.
• 1Password: offboard a team member — the transfer, suspend, rotate, delete order and the Employee vault warning.