JetBrains' own books show the per-seat IDE deal is dying, so renegotiate now

JetBrains s.r.o., the Prague company behind IntelliJ and its sibling IDEs, booked CZK 16,008 mil of revenue in 2025, the most it has ever reported, and finished the year CZK 315 mil in the red. Its gross margin was 10.7%. In 2021 it was 53.7%. Over those five years revenue rose every single year, from CZK 9,926 mil, while gross profit shrank from CZK 5,332 mil to CZK 1,708 mil. Few software businesses sell more every year while keeping less of each sale this quickly.

When I opened the filing I assumed the loss came from the core business. Most of it came from further down. EBIT was still a positive CZK 751 mil. Net financing costs of CZK 1,078 mil turned that into a pre-tax loss of CZK 325 mil, a year after the same line produced a gain of CZK 810 mil. The company ended 2025 with CZK 7,584 mil of net cash. Anyone calling JetBrains a distressed vendor has misread the numbers, and I am not making that claim.

The harder objection is about whose numbers these are. Helgi Library reads them from the Prague entity's own unconsolidated statements, and Craft.co lists that entity as a subsidiary of a group headquartered in Amsterdam. Groups move revenue and costs between companies for tax and treasury reasons, so part of that slide to 10.7% could be bookkeeping. The company also grew fast: Revelio Labs counts 3,322 employees in December 2025, up 44.5% from 2,299 in 2023, and staff expenses rose 34.2% last year alone. It also stopped sales and R&D in Russia after the 2022 invasion. You could explain much of the margin story without mentioning AI once.

I would buy that explanation if JetBrains had not told us otherwise through its own price list. On 25 August 2025 it rewrote its AI plans so that each quota equals the plan price, with one credit worth USD 1.00. AI Ultimate costs USD 30 a month and includes USD 35 of credits. JetBrains conceded in its announcement that some plans' quotas were getting smaller. In my experience, a vendor whose seat revenue comfortably covers model bills does not go to its customers to shrink their allowance. Those customers noticed. One wrote on the JetBrains support forum that matching his old usage would now cost well over $100 a month, and that credit burn jumped after GPT-5 arrived without warning. Someone filed issue LLM-20216 on YouTrack under the title "A theft in plain daylight."

GitHub followed the same path. On 1 June 2026 every Copilot plan moved to AI Credits billed on input, output and cached tokens at each model's API rate. Seat prices held at $19 for Business and $39 for Enterprise, each including credits equal to its price. The included allowance was set at 3,000 and 7,000 credits per seat until 1 September, then dropped to 1,900 and 3,900, a cut of up to 44% at an unchanged price. Visual Studio Magazine ran the developer verdict as its headline: you will get less, but pay the same price.

I think the incentives here are simple. Seat pricing worked because one more developer cost the vendor almost nothing to serve. An agent writing code burns tokens, and that cost scales with how hard it is worked, which has nothing to do with headcount. A vendor facing that has two moves: absorb the inference bill and watch gross margin fall, or meter it and push the bill to the customer. JetBrains appears to have done the first and then switched to the second. GitHub went straight to the meter. Either way the seat has become a minimum charge with a prepaid deposit attached, and buyers are still negotiating it as if it bought a tool.

That gives procurement more leverage than most teams are using. Both JetBrains and GitHub now price credits at roughly face value, so the AI part of the contract is a commodity and should be bid as one. Ask for credits pooled across the whole organisation instead of stranded per seat. Ask for the included allowance to be fixed for the full contract term, since GitHub has just shown it will cut allowances mid-year. Ask for an overage cap. And cut seats for developers who mostly use completions, which Copilot still gives away free.

Pull your September and October Copilot invoices and count how many Business seats ran past the 1,900 credits now included. Each of those developers is costing you a list-price seat plus API-rate overage, and at your next IDE renewal, with either vendor, you should refuse to pay for both.

Prompted by JetBrains - Company Data, helgilibrary.com.