One accepted place on your organization is one seat. Owner, admin, supervisor, plain member and rostered shift worker all count the same. There is no free role.
An invitation that has not been accepted is not a seat. It might never be accepted, and charging you for a colleague who never showed up is the kind of charge that turns into an argument.
A free organization is never billed for anybody.
Why every role counts
The internal reporting views are open to every member of an organization on a plan that carries them, not only to owners and admins. And every member gets their own Work Score, worked out for them and shown to them. Both of those are things of value delivered to each person on the list, so each person on the list is counted.
Rostered workers count too, and that is deliberate
If you send a shift record to somebody who does not have a Credda account and they claim it, they join your roster. That roster place is a seat.
A care agency that rosters forty carers on a per seat plan pays for forty seats. This is the intended behavior, for two reasons worth knowing. Those forty people are forty rows in the boards you are paying for. And if roster places were free, the cheap way to add console readers would be to send them a shift record and have them claim it, so an exemption meant to help small employers would be used by everyone else.
You can always bring the number down. An owner or an admin can remove somebody, and any member can leave on their own.
What you are shown is what you are charged
One count feeds three things: the seat number you are shown before you buy, the line on the checkout page, and the ongoing sync with the card processor. They cannot disagree with each other, because they are the same calculation.
Team is priced per seat. Whether Business is priced per seat or as one fee for the whole organization depends on how Credda has it set up, so read the quantity on your own checkout page rather than assuming. Current prices are on the pricing page.
If you are about to send shift records to a batch of people, the screen tells you what it will cost in seats before the batch goes out, not afterwards on an invoice. If your organization is on an older version of the service and that sentence is missing, the screen says nothing about money rather than guessing at a rule.
A worked example
A care agency has one owner, one office administrator as an admin, three team leaders as supervisors, and forty carers who claimed their shift records.
That is forty five seats on a per seat plan. Six pending invitations to relief staff who have not replied are not seats and are not charged.
If eight of the forty carers leave over the summer and are removed from the roster, the count drops to thirty seven and the charge follows it.
What a seat does not buy
A seat does not buy anybody a better score. No plan, at any price, moves a score. There is no code path by which it could.
A seat does not buy secrecy from the people on your roster. Every worker sees the same Work Score breakdown you see, free, on their own account. That is a fairness rule, not a feature, and it is not for sale.
A seat does not buy verification. If your organization has not been corroborated as a real employer, an active paid plan is one of the ways to fix that, and it is explicitly not required. A real two-person business is cleared by a person, not by paying.