Linear App Pricing: Every Plan and Seat Cost (2026)
Oct 20, 202612 min read
Your bill is the seat price multiplied by headcount, because Linear charges per member, and the Business seat now costs $16 per month. Ten people cost $160 a month.
View every Linear plan, price and limit
Forty cost $640, so growth moves the bill faster than any list price does, even when the extra people are only there to review work that tools like Activepieces already route to them.
Linear plan prices we could confirm in 2026
Where a cell says "Not confirmed," we couldn't verify the figure, and a wrong number in a budget is worse than none. The table lists the four plans against what we could confirm on the pricing page.
| Plan | Monthly price per user | Annual price per user | Key inclusions | Usage limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | Not confirmed | Not confirmed |
| Basic | Not confirmed | Not confirmed | Not confirmed | Not confirmed |
| Business | $16 per user/month, billed yearly | Not confirmed | Not confirmed | Not confirmed |
| Enterprise | Not confirmed | Not confirmed | Not confirmed | Not confirmed |
Get a written quote for Enterprise before you commit a budget to it, because Free, Basic and Business prices are listed.
How the Business seat price has changed
In October 2024, Business cost $12 per seat per month. It rose to $14 in December 2024 and to $16 in January 2026. That's three prices in about fifteen months, and a third more than the starting point.
For a 25-person team, that meant going from $300 to $400 a month, an extra $1,200 a year for the same software. Budget for another step, not for today's price staying put.
What counts as a billable member
The question to ask is who holds a seat. A billable member is anyone you invite into the workspace with their own seat.
If they join as full members, contractors, part-timers and scripted accounts can each take a seat, so count them when you price the team or you'll find them on the invoice.
Tell the built-in chat in Activepieces which members to list and how to mark the non-employees, and what comes back is a published flow in your account, identical to one a builder would have assembled by hand.
It sits under the same RBAC and audit logs as every flow a person wrote, and each run leaves a trace that finance can read without any training, so nobody has to be hired to build it.
MoneyGram, Moneypenny, Alan and FundingSocieties run it in production.
If you are running this arithmetic for your own team, see what the same workload costs on Activepieces.
What Linear costs at five, 25, 100 seats
On annual billing, Linear charges $600 (Basic) or $960 (Business) a year at five seats. At 25 seats it's $3,000 or $4,800, and at 100 it's $12,000 or $19,200.
Nothing below is a quote. The table is my arithmetic from the listed per-seat prices ($12 monthly or $10 annual on Basic, $18 or $16 on Business). It shows the gap between tiers and the billing saving both growing with the team.
| Plan and seats | Yearly total, monthly billing | Yearly total, annual billing | Saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic, 5 | $720 | $600 | $120 |
| Basic, 25 | $3,600 | $3,000 | $600 |
| Basic, 100 | $14,400 | $12,000 | $2,400 |
| Business, 5 | $1,080 | $960 | $120 |
| Business, 25 | $5,400 | $4,800 | $600 |
| Business, 100 | $21,600 | $19,200 | $2,400 |
Billing choice sets the discount while the plan you pick sets the gap between rows, because the saving is the same on both tiers.
For a five-person startup, Business costs $360 more a year than Basic. Choose on the features you need, not the price. Annual billing saves $120 either way.
For a 25-person product team, the Basic-to-Business gap is now $1,800 a year. Paying monthly instead of annually costs an extra $600, so it's worth doing only if you honestly expect the headcount to change within the year.
At 100 seats Business runs $7,200 a year above Basic, and monthly billing wastes $2,400 on either.
Enterprise is sales-quoted, so there's no published number to plan around. Budget for a negotiation, not a line item, and do it before renewal, because finding out the price at renewal leaves you with no leverage.
Hidden costs and limits teams hit on Linear
Find which gate you'll hit before renewal, while you still have leverage. Four of them set most of what Linear costs beyond the per-seat price, and here they're in the order teams usually meet them:
- The free plan caps teams and issues.
- Google single sign-on is available on every plan, SAML is Enterprise only, and admin roles start at the Basic plan.
- Guests are billed as paid seats.
- Seats added mid-cycle are billed when you add them.
Because each gate arrives without a warning label, the sections below take them one at a time.
Until the day the cap blocks work, a small group can run on the free plan comfortably. The plan limits both teams and issues.
Hitting the cap forces an upgrade on the vendor's schedule, not yours, so treat the free plan as a trial with an expiry date you can't see.
SSO, which lets people log in with your company identity system, is available on every plan with Google, and SAML is Enterprise only. Other admin controls and reporting sit above the entry paid tier too.
If your security reviewer or finance lead needs one of these, you're buying the higher plan for every seat, not just theirs.
Guests, such as contractors and clients, are billed as paid seats. A part-time contractor therefore costs the same as a full-time engineer. Count everyone who needs a login, not just your payroll.
When you add a seat partway through a billing cycle, you're charged for it right away. Hiring in bursts therefore produces several small charges instead of one clean annual number. Ask whether removing a seat earns a credit, and get the answer in writing.
Worth checking against a plan that does not meter every step: one credit covers a whole run on Activepieces.
Compare Linear's price against Jira, Shortcut, ClickUp, Asana
Linear's per-seat price rarely separates it from Jira, Shortcut, ClickUp or Asana.
What does is which plan holds single sign-on (one company login for every tool) and advanced reporting, and how soon the free tier runs out. That's also why a seat you can remove without a credit matters so much.
Price and limits side by side
I have no vendor-verified figures to put in a table here, and a comparison built on remembered prices would be worse than none.
Pull the free-tier limits, the entry paid price, the single sign-on tier and the reporting tier from each vendor's own pricing page. Write down the date you checked, because all five change their plans.
Doing nothing costs you here. If you compare only the headline per-seat price, you'll pick the tool that looks cheapest and find out at renewal that login control or reporting sits one plan higher.
Where Linear costs more or less
If your whole team writes and ships code, Linear suits you: it is built for software teams and keeps its plan structure fairly simple, so there are fewer places for a surprise.
It hurts if you add people who only need to look. Designers, support staff and managers each count as a seat unless the plan says otherwise, so ask each vendor how it treats occasional users.
Jira, ClickUp and Asana are broader tools, so a mixed team can cost less on one of them even when the engineering seats cost more.
When Jira, Asana or Shortcut beats Linear
Pick on the work, then check the price. Jira suits teams that need heavy configuration and approval rules.
Asana and ClickUp suit teams where most users aren't engineers. Shortcut is the closest in spirit to Linear, so compare the two on the plan you'll actually need.
Choose Linear when speed and a focused workflow matter more than flexibility, and when the seat count you price is the one you'll have next year.
Run this in Activepieces: a monthly Linear seat audit
If the seat count you price is the one you'll have next year, a monthly check will tell you the moment it stops being true. Seats creep up quietly, and an unused seat is billed the same as a busy one.
So the cheapest fix is to look before the invoice does. This flow does the looking for you:
Seats creep up quietly, and an unused seat is billed the same as a busy one.
- Set a schedule trigger to run once a month, a few days before your billing date, so you have time to act on what it finds.
- Fetch your Linear members. The facts I have don't confirm a Linear integration in Activepieces, so this step uses an HTTP request to Linear's GraphQL API, which returns the list of people in your workspace.
- Compare the count to your paid seats. Count the members returned and check that against the number of seats you pay for. If the first is higher, your next bill is already larger than you planned.
- Post the result to Slack. Send both numbers to the channel where whoever approves spending will see them, so the answer lands in front of the right person.
You can build this flow free in Activepieces.
What to do about Linear's pricing on Monday
Do five things in order, and you'll know what Linear costs your team before you sign anything. The list below is the whole job, and the rest of this section explains the two steps people tend to skip.
- Confirm the current prices and plan contents on linear.app/pricing, not from memory or an old quote.
- Count every member, including guests, who'll have an account.
- Choose monthly or annual billing, and write down the reason.
- Pick the lowest tier that includes the one feature you need.
- Put a review on the calendar before the renewal date.
Skipping the first two steps costs you the most, because everything else is built on those numbers.
Verify, then count seats
Read the pricing page the day you decide, because prices and plan contents change. A figure from a blog post or a salesperson's email may describe a plan that no longer exists.
Then count people, not job titles. Include the contractor who joins next month and the designer who only comments on issues.
Ask whether guests are billed on your plan, because some tools charge for them and some don't. Count the team you'll have by the next renewal, since the bill follows headcount.
For billing, annual usually costs less per seat but locks you in. Choose it only if you're confident the team won't shrink. Choose monthly if hiring is uncertain, and accept the higher rate as the price of flexibility.
Pick the tier by the feature, not the team size
Name the single feature you can't work without, then find the cheapest tier that includes it. Buying a higher tier "just in case" means every seat pays for features nobody opens. Buying too low forces an upgrade mid-year, usually in a hurry.
Last, set the review for a few weeks before renewal. That gives you time to remove unused seats and check whether a lower tier still covers you. Without it, the plan renews at whatever size it has quietly grown to.
Frequently asked questions
Is Linear free for small teams?
Yes, Linear has a free plan, but it carries caps on how much work and how many teams it holds. A small team can run on it until it reaches a cap.
At that point the next step is a paid plan, so the free plan is a starting point to outgrow, not a place to stay. Check the current limits on Linear's pricing page before you commit.
Does Linear offer discounts for startups or students? Linear's pricing page doesn't show a startup discount that we can confirm, so don't build a budget around one.
Linear has historically had a separate education offer for students and educators, but eligibility terms are Linear's to set. Ask Linear directly before assuming either discount applies to you.
Can I change plans or cancel any time? Yes, an admin can change the plan from the workspace billing settings. Moving up is simple.
Moving down is where the cost of doing nothing shows: features behind the higher plan stop being available, and the free plan's caps apply again. Look at what your team relies on before you downgrade, not after.
Do I pay for guests and viewers in Linear?
It depends on the plan, and this is the question most worth checking against your own team.
Guest access is a feature gated to higher plans, and whether a guest adds to your bill is set by Linear's billing rules, not by how rarely that person logs in.
Even a contractor who only reads one project can change your invoice. Count guests when you count seats, and confirm the rule on Linear's billing documentation.
Related reading
Running the numbers
See what the same workload costs here.
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