Linear's pricing page is refreshingly short. Four plans, two published numbers, no calculator. That simplicity is genuine, and it is also why teams misjudge what Linear will actually cost them: the per-seat figure is the easy part, and the seat count is where the bill gets decided.
This is the honest breakdown. What each plan costs, which limits bite first, what the Free plan really gets you, and the seat math that separates a $120 per month workspace from a $290 one with the same engineering team in it.
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Linear Pricing Plans at a Glance
Four tiers. The two middle ones are where almost everyone lands.
| Plan | Price per user | Teams | Issues | Headline feature |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 2 | 250 non-archived | Unlimited members, agent platform |
| Basic | $10/mo billed annually | 5 | Unlimited | Admin roles, unlimited uploads, full API |
| Business | $16/mo billed annually | Unlimited | Unlimited | Private teams, guests, Insights, Asks |
| Enterprise | Custom, annual only | Unlimited | Unlimited | SAML and SCIM, audit log, migration support |
Paying month to month instead of committing for a year costs about $12 per user on Basic and about $18 on Business. Linear's pricing page shows the annual rate by default, so the monthly figure is easy to miss until the first invoice.
What the Free Plan Actually Gets You
Linear's free tier is unusually generous in one dimension and firmly capped in three others. Unlimited members is the generous part, and it is real: you can put the whole company in the workspace without paying.
The caps are what end it.
250 non-archived issues
The one that gets you. An active team of five engineers files 250 issues in a few months, and the counter tracks non-archived issues, so the workaround is a cleanup habit rather than a fix. When you hit the ceiling, you are choosing between archiving work you still want visible and upgrading.
2 teams
Fine for a single product squad. It stops working the moment you want a separate space for, say, design or infrastructure, and Linear's team primitive is how you separate work streams.
10MB file uploads
Adequate for screenshots, not for the screen recording a customer sent you or the crash log a support agent attached to a ticket.
No admin roles
Everyone has the same level of access. That is workable at five people and uncomfortable at fifteen, particularly once non-engineers are in the workspace.
The honest read: Free is a genuine free tier, not a demo, and it is the right place to evaluate Linear properly. It is not a place to run a team for a year.
Basic: $10 per User per Month
Basic is the "remove the caps" plan. Unlimited issues, unlimited file uploads, 5 teams, admin roles, and full API access. For a single engineering org that is not yet dealing with permissions or outside collaborators, it is usually the correct answer and it stays correct for a while.
At 12 engineers, that is $120 per month billed annually. Not much argument to have.
The reason to read the next section anyway is that Basic has no guest accounts, no private teams, and no Insights. Two of those three are permissions features, which means the upgrade trigger tends to arrive from outside engineering rather than from within it.
Business: $16 per User per Month
Business adds five things worth naming:
- Unlimited teams and private teams. The permissions story. Private teams are how you keep a sensitive workstream out of the general workspace.
- Guest accounts. Restricted access scoped to specific teams, for contractors, clients, or colleagues outside engineering.
- Linear Insights. Dashboards and progress reporting on your own issue data.
- Linear Asks. Intake from Slack, turning requests into tracked work.
- Zendesk and Intercom integrations. The customer-facing wire, which feeds Linear's customer request primitive.
That last line is worth pausing on if your support team runs somewhere other than Zendesk or Intercom, and we will come back to it.
Enterprise
Custom pricing, annual billing only. What you are buying is SAML and SCIM provisioning, an audit log, granular admin controls, advanced organization modeling, migration support, and an account manager. If you cannot name which of those you need, you do not need Enterprise yet. The tell is procurement or security asking a question you cannot answer on Business.
Monthly vs Annual: The Only Easy Saving
There is no clever arbitrage in Linear's pricing, but there is one obvious discount and a lot of teams leave it sitting there. If you are past the evaluation stage and confident in the tool, the annual commitment is the cheapest decision available to you. On a 20 person workspace at Business rates, that is roughly $480 a year for signing up to something you were going to keep anyway.
The Seat Math Nobody Does Up Front
Here is the part the pricing page cannot tell you, because it depends on who you invite.
Linear has no read-only seat. Guests are cheaper in access than members, not in price: they see only the teams you scope them to, and they are billed as regular members. There is no observer tier, no free viewer, no discounted support seat.
Run the numbers on a normal B2B SaaS team of 12 engineers and 6 people in support and customer success who want to know whether a customer's bug has been fixed.
| Scenario | Seats | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering only, Basic | 12 at $10 | $120 |
| Engineering only, Business | 12 at $16 | $192 |
| Engineering plus support as guests, Business | 18 at $16 | $288 |
Same engineering team in all three rows. The difference between the first and the last is $168 per month, or just over $2,000 a year, and none of it bought a single additional engineer any capability. It bought six people the ability to look something up.
The expensive question is not which Linear plan to buy. It is how many people you put in Linear who are not doing engineering work in it.
Where Linear's Pricing Bites B2B SaaS Teams
The pattern is consistent enough to predict. Engineering adopts Linear, loves it, and runs happily on Basic. Then support starts asking for status on customer-reported bugs, and there are exactly three ways that request gets resolved.
Buy them seats. Straightforward and expensive, and it puts people in a tool built for engineering workflow to perform a read. It also tends to grow: once support is in, customer success wants in, then sales wants in for the escalated accounts.
Have them ask an engineer. Free, and it costs more than the seats do. This is the Slack ping loop that support and engineering communication problems are made of, and the cost lands on the person you least want interrupted.
Sync the status to where support already works. Support stays in the help desk they were already paying for, engineering stays in Linear, and the issue's status travels between them. Nobody buys a seat to read a field.
That third option is only obvious once you have seen the seat math, which is why it usually arrives after the invoice rather than before it.
If your support tool is Zendesk or Intercom, Linear's own Business tier integrations cover it. If your support runs in HubSpot Service Hub, Linear has no native connection in either direction, so the wire has to come from outside the integrations directory. That is the gap IssueLinker fills: tickets and issues stay in step both ways, and the support team never needs a Linear login to know where a bug stands.
Stop buying Linear seats so support can read a status field
IssueLinker syncs HubSpot tickets and Linear issues both ways, with comments and status flowing in each direction. Support answers the customer from HubSpot, engineering stays in Linear, and nobody pays $16 a month for a read-only view. Flat pricing per portal, not per seat.
For the sake of a fair comparison: at $39 per month flat regardless of headcount, that approach beats guest seats past roughly the third support person, and the gap widens with every hire. Below that, buying the seats is genuinely the simpler call, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
How to Pick a Linear Plan
Match the plan to the constraint you have actually hit, not the feature list you find appealing.
A real evaluation, not a demo. Put the whole team in, run a full cycle, and see whether Linear's opinionated model fits how you work. Plan on outgrowing it within a few months of committing, and treat the 250 issue counter as the countdown clock it is.
The default for most teams that have chosen Linear. Removes every cap that matters, keeps the bill at $10 per engineer, and does not charge you for permissions machinery you have not needed yet. Stay here until a specific Business feature is blocking someone.
Right when the trigger is real: a workstream that must be private, contractors who need scoped access, or reporting engineering leadership keeps asking for. Wrong when the trigger is only that non-engineers want visibility, because that problem has a cheaper solution.
SAML, SCIM, and an audit log are the substance here. If nobody has asked you for those by name, the quote will not be worth the conversation yet.
Four Ways to Keep the Linear Bill Down
None of these are tricks. They are the four places money leaks.
Before your next renewal
- Commit annually if you are past evaluating. It is a 17 percent saving on Basic and 11 percent on Business for a decision you have already made.
- Audit the member list for people who left or moved teams. Deactivated accounts holding seats are the most common quiet overpayment in any per-seat tool.
- Separate the people who work in Linear from the people who only read from it. Only the first group needs a seat, and the split is usually more lopsided than anyone expects.
- Check whether you are on Business for one feature. If guests are the only reason, price the alternative to guests before you renew.
Is Linear Worth the Price
Per seat, Linear is not the cheapest issue tracker available, and it does not try to be. Jira is free to 10 users and cheaper per seat above that. The argument for paying more is that Linear needs less of everything else: less configuration, less admin time, fewer workflow states nobody understands, and fewer people whose job is keeping the tracker tidy.
That argument holds up well for engineering teams and holds up poorly as a reason to put your whole company in the tool. Linear is priced like a tool for the people doing the work, and it behaves like one. The teams who feel good about the invoice are the ones who kept the seat list honest and connected everyone else through something else.
