What are billable seats?

SaaS Protection bills for user seats that are considered protected seats. A user's seat is a protected seat if it is in one of the following statuses:

• Active or Standard: The seat exists in the organization and is actively backed up.
• Paused or Inactive: The seat exists in the organization; backups were enabled but are currently paused.
• Archived: The seat no longer exists in the organization, but backups are still accessible.

Non-billable seat

A seat status of Unprotected means the seat exists in the organization but backups are not enabled. An unprotected seat is not a billable seat and therefore, a license fee is not charged for the seat.

Each SharePoint site and each Team requires a seat but the seat is not billable. Each licensed user has access to their company's SharePoint sites and Teams. Backups of SharePoint sites and Teams are complimentary (but these backups are included in your subscription's backup storage consumption calculation).

An M365 shared mailbox is charged a monthly license fee only if it has a license in your M365 environment (but these backups are included in your subscription's backup storage consumption calculation). A shared mailbox has a license in the M365 environment because of one of the following reasons:

• The shared mailbox has over 50 GB of storage, at which point Microsoft requires a license.
• The Microsoft user account converts to a shared mailbox, and the Microsoft license was not removed from the account.

M365 users that are converted to shared mailboxes and have their Microsoft license removed will be recognized as shared mailboxes in SaaS Protection. The previous backups will be maintained and are still subject to retention.

For more on how pricing works for your subscription, see Understanding the pricing model.