2 February 2026

Seat decay is not churn

Churn is a commercial event: a contract ends or a seat is removed on purpose. Decay is a usage event: a seat remains paid and unused. Mixing them in a board pack makes expansion look heroic and finance look late.

In Seat Decay Workshop we ask for two windows. One is short enough that ops can nudge. One is long enough that billing does not send a punitive email after a school holiday. A Leeds team used fourteen and forty-five days. Their product is used heavily in term time; a single window punished August.

Automation here is a job that marks decay, not a job that cancels. Cancellation remains a human. The clinic’s mild controversy is that some founders want decay to trigger a discount automatically. We refuse that in class because discounts without freeze rights become a second ledger nobody owns.

If you only take one artefact from the workshop, take the sentence that finance is allowed to reject the decay table. Rejection means the control worked.