A software factory, as its sellers use the phrase, is a fleet of coding agents wired across the whole delivery loop - triage, spec, implement, review, verify - and sold as a plant rather than a tool: something you configure once, run continuously and judge by its output. The word does positioning work a “coding agent” cannot. An agent is bought per seat by a developer; a factory is bought by whoever owns throughput, and it arrives with a metric already attached.

The question this thread follows is whether that is a category or a company. As of 2026-11-10 it is a category with a price shape but no price, and a metric with many values but no definition.

  • The word is everyone’s, and it is now a product name at five sellers.
  • The price is a markup on the model maker’s list price, published at three sellers, from 10% to 40%. The highest belongs to the incumbent.
  • The metric has figures from sellers, buyers and a measurement firm, and no two count the same thing.

The incumbent’s rate was on another domain

The product Harness sells as its Cosmos Software Factory Agent (opens in a new tab) has a public price. It is not on Harness’s pricing page (opens in a new tab), which on 2026-11-10 still had no Cosmos line and sold its plans “by quotation”. It is on Augment’s (opens in a new tab), the coding-agent maker whose Cosmos Harness took over on 2026-10-08. That page’s footer now reads ”© 2026 Harness, Inc.”, and its navigation calls Cosmos “Software Factory”. Augment’s product page (opens in a new tab) is headed “Build your software factory.” The terms on 2026-11-10:

  • Model usage is “billed at the provider’s public API list price”.
  • A service fee of “a flat 40% fee on LLM usage (no fee on compute)”.
  • Compute is Cosmos time, at $0.19 an hour (opens in a new tab) in five-minute steps.
  • Plans: Standard $20 and Business $100 a month, flat for up to 50 seats, with that much usage included. Enterprise is custom.

Put the three published markups side by side:

That is a convention, a markup on someone else’s model rate, with a spread of four to one. A reader pricing a product in this space has a reference shape. They do not yet have a reference number.

The other incumbent never needed a markup. GitLab’s governed software factory (opens in a new tab) release (2026-10-06) named credits without rates, but the rates were public all along. GitLab’s pricing page (opens in a new tab) sells credits at $1 each, with $12 a user a month included on Premium and $24 on Ultimate as a limited-time offer. Its docs (opens in a new tab) list how many requests a credit buys on each model, and price a code review at a quarter of a credit. The incumbents, in other words, both publish a rate. They publish it in different units.

The startups with the most money behind the word publish none:

Every direction has a figure, and none match

Cost per merged PR now has values from every kind of source. Each counts something different:

All of it is self-reported, and none of it lines up. The sellers’ figures are tokens on agent PRs. Jellyfish’s is everything, on human PRs. Uber, which named cost per merged PR as the metric for its in-house Software Factory (opens in a new tab) on 2026-08-27, has still published no value.

The Jellyfish number is the most useful thing here for a reader, because of what it implies. If AI is about 2% of what a merged PR costs, a buyer who owns throughput will judge a factory on the other 98%. The gap between a 10% and a 40% markup is a gap of about one percent of that bill.

The word is everyone’s

Since late August the word has spread to every kind of company in the market:

The word was never Warp’s to begin with. The US Department of Defense has called its in-house units software factories (opens in a new tab) for years. For a reader positioning a product, “factory” no longer sets it apart.

The tension

The two sellers with the most money behind them still sell other nouns. OpenAI’s frame is Codex as a platform (opens in a new tab). No title on Cognition’s blog (opens in a new tab) since September uses the word, through “Introducing SWE-2 Flash” on 11-04.

The best arguments against the frame are about what it measures. PostHog’s newsletter notes that “there’s no actual criteria for what counts as a software factory” (opens in a new tab). Noah Brier argues that the hard part is keeping agents’ work coherent with what the company is trying to be: “It’s a software company, not a software factory” (opens in a new tab). And Jellyfish’s $18 in $799 says the unit sellers compete on is the smallest line of the bill.

So, as of 2026-11-10:

  • “Software factory” is everyone’s word and, at five sellers, a product name.
  • The price has a shape, a markup on the model maker’s list price, and three published points: 10%, 20% and 40%. Both incumbents publish a rate. The best-funded startups do not.
  • Cost per merged PR has six published values and no shared definition.

The category exists. Whether it has a price depends on whether the markup settles on a number, and whether a buyer can ever compare two factories depends on two figures being counted the same way.

What would settle it

3 open loops

  1. 01 By end of March 2027

    Does the markup settle on a number? Three sellers publish one: 10% (SuperPlane), 20% (Warp's pay-as-you-go) and 40% (Augment, for Harness's Cosmos). Harness's own pricing page still quotes, 8090 serves no price, Factory sells seats with limits and Tessl prices sessions in credits with no rate. A fourth seller publishing inside that band, or Harness putting Cosmos on harness.io at a stated fee, makes the markup the category's price. A seller dropping its public rate for quotes points the other way.

  2. 02 By end of January 2027

    Do any two published costs per merged PR count the same thing - merged PRs, a dated window, and the spend named? CampusIQ's $29 is tokens over an undated window; Tessl's $13 has no window, count or definition; Guild's $12 has no count; Jellyfish's $820 is all-in and counts only human-opened PRs. Uber defines the metric and still publishes no value.

  3. 03 By end of 2026

    Does OpenAI or Cognition adopt the word in its own launch copy? GitLab, Harness, Tessl, Guild, Opsera and Factory have. Through 2026-11-10 OpenAI still sells a platform and Cognition sells Devin; no title of Cognition's posts through "Introducing SWE-2 Flash" (11-04) uses the word. Adoption by either makes "factory" the field's name rather than everyone else's frame.

Each is checkable by a date. If one goes quiet, that is itself an answer.