Linear Pricing 2026: What It Actually Costs at 1, 5, and 10 Seats

Linear pricing right now, no rounding

Linear sells four tiers, and only two of them (Basic and Business) involve a credit card. Here is exactly what's on the pricing page today, pulled directly from linear.app rather than from a screenshot someone took eight months ago.

Two things jump out compared to what a lot of "Linear pricing" posts still say. First, Basic used to be $8/user/month - it moved to $10 in 2026, a 25% increase that Linear didn't make a big announcement about. We tracked that shift in our broader SaaS pricing changes report alongside similar quiet increases from Bolt and Pipedrive. Second, the pricing page we checked today shows no monthly-billing toggle at all - every number is presented as an annual-billed rate. If you're used to picking "bill me monthly" on other SaaS tools, don't assume Linear still offers that at the advertised price; verify the option at checkout before you budget around it.

The free plan's real limit isn't seats, it's 250 issues

This is the detail that trips up teams evaluating Linear for the first time: the Free plan gives you unlimited members, which is genuinely rare for a project management tool at this price point. Most competitors cap free-tier seats at 5 or 10 users. Linear doesn't.

What it caps instead is total issues across your workspace: 250, full stop, shared across up to 2 teams. That sounds generous until you do the math on an active engineering team. A team of 4 shipping normally creates somewhere between 15 and 40 issues a week once you count bugs, small tasks, and sub-issues alongside feature work. At a conservative 20 issues/week, you cross 250 in about 12-13 weeks - just over 3 months. Teams that use Linear aggressively (logging every small fix, using it for support triage, or running weekly sprints with granular tickets) can hit the cap in 6-8 weeks.

The practical effect: the free plan is not a "small team forever" tier, it's a trial period with no expiration date on the calendar but a very real expiration date on your activity. If you're shipping weekly, budget for Basic within your first quarter. If you're a true solo side project with sporadic commits, Free can genuinely last a long time - the cap resets nothing, but 250 issues for a project you touch a few times a month can stretch past a year.

One more wrinkle worth flagging honestly: Linear's pricing page states the 250-issue and 2-team limits as plan features but doesn't spell out whether closed/archived issues count against the cap the same way open ones do. We could not verify that distinction from the public page, so if you're close to the limit, check inside your own workspace settings rather than assuming archived work is free.

What Linear actually costs at 1, 5, and 10 seats

Here's the number that matters more than the per-seat sticker price: what you'll actually pay per month and per year, at the team sizes most ToolPick readers are evaluating against.

1 seat: stay on Free until the issue cap forces your hand

A solo developer almost never needs Basic on day one. Free's unlimited members and 2-team structure cover a single person comfortably, and the 250-issue cap is the only thing that will eventually push you to pay. If you're building something you'll actively iterate on for more than a few months, plan for roughly $120/year (Basic, billed yearly) once you cross the cap - that's cheaper than most standalone task managers once you factor in what Linear replaces (issue tracker, lightweight roadmap, and a decent chunk of what people otherwise pay for in Notion or Trello add-ons).

5 seats: this is where the Basic-vs-Business decision actually happens

At 5 seats, the gap between Basic ($600/year) and Business ($960/year) is $360/year - real money for an early-stage team, but not enough to agonize over if you genuinely need one specific Business feature. The decision comes down to three questions:

• Do you need private teams? If any team (say, a founders-only or security-sensitive team) shouldn't be visible to the whole workspace, that's Business-only.
• Do you need guest accounts? If you collaborate with contractors or clients who shouldn't count as full members but need limited visibility, that's Business-only.
• Do you need Triage Intelligence or Code Intelligence? These are Linear's AI-assisted triage and code-context features - genuinely useful once you have enough inbound issue volume that manual triage becomes a bottleneck, but overkill for a 5-person team still figuring out its workflow.

Most 5-person teams we'd recommend Linear to don't need any of the three yet. Start on Basic, upgrade the moment private teams or guest access becomes a real requirement rather than a nice-to-have.

10 seats: unlimited teams starts to matter, and so does the annual commitment

At 10 seats, Basic caps you at 5 teams, which is tight if you're organizing by feature area, platform, or squad rather than one flat team. Business's unlimited teams stops being a luxury and starts being structural once you're running more than 5 concurrent workstreams. The annual cost gap here is $720/year (10 seats) - big enough that it's worth an actual team discussion, not a default upgrade.

The other thing to flag at this size: you're committing to annual billing at either tier based on what the pricing page shows. A 10-person team paying $1,200-$1,920/year upfront is a real budget line, not a "cancel anytime" SaaS subscription in the way monthly-billed tools are. Confirm your actual billing terms at checkout - some workspaces may see a monthly option that isn't surfaced on the public marketing page - before you commit a team of 10 to an annual contract.

When Linear's pricing doesn't make sense for you

Linear is priced and built for software teams that live in issue trackers. It gets worse value the further you move from that use case:

• Non-engineering teams (marketing, ops, HR) generally don't get $10-16/user/month of value out of Linear's issue-tracking-first model. You're paying for sprint planning and GitHub-native workflows you won't use.
• Teams needing built-in docs or wiki will end up paying for Linear and Notion or Confluence side by side - Linear's document features are thin by design.
• Teams with fewer than 5 active weekly issues are almost certainly better off staying on Free indefinitely; the 250-issue cap simply won't bind for you.

If you're weighing the product itself rather than just the price, our full Linear review covers workflow fit, keyboard-first UX, and where the tool's opinionated design helps or hurts. And if you're actively comparing Linear against the rest of the market rather than deciding whether to upgrade tiers, our head-to-head breakdowns go deeper on workflow fit: Linear vs Jira for teams migrating off heavier enterprise tooling, Linear vs GitHub Issues if you're deciding whether you need a dedicated tracker at all, and Notion vs Linear if docs and tasks living in the same tool matters more to you than issue-tracking speed. For teams that have outgrown Linear's model entirely, our Linear alternatives for startups roundup covers where teams go next and why.

Questions worth answering before you upgrade

Does Linear ever discount annual pricing further for startups? Linear doesn't publish a separate startup discount program on its pricing page the way some infra vendors do. If you're early-stage and think you qualify for something non-public, that's a sales conversation, not a self-serve toggle - don't assume a discount exists until someone from Linear confirms it in writing.

Can you mix Basic and Business seats in one workspace? The public pricing page prices per workspace tier, not per seat tier, which implies the whole workspace sits on one plan rather than letting you put half your team on Basic and half on Business. If your team has a small subset that genuinely needs Business-only features (say, two people who need guest-account access), the practical answer is usually to upgrade the whole workspace rather than expect a split-tier setup - confirm this with Linear directly if it matters for your budget, since it isn't spelled out in plain terms on the marketing page.

What happens to your issues if you downgrade from Basic back to Free? This isn't documented on the pricing page either. If you're testing Basic and might drop back down, don't assume your issue history survives a downgrade cleanly - export or back up before you experiment with downgrading a workspace that has more than 250 issues in it.

The bottom line

Linear's pricing is simple on the surface - three real numbers, $0/$10/$16 - but the decision that actually costs you money is the issue-cap timeline, not the seat price. Budget for Basic within your first 2-4 months of active use if you're shipping weekly; stay on Free longer if your usage is genuinely light. Skip Business unless private teams, guest accounts, or AI-assisted triage are requirements today, not someday. And because the public pricing page currently shows annual billing only, get your actual billing terms confirmed at checkout before you commit a growing team to a yearly contract.

Prices verified directly against linear.app/pricing on 2026-07-11. Linear's own product philosophy and workflow assumptions are documented at linear.app/method if you want the reasoning behind why the tool is built the way it is before you commit budget to it.