Linear
€9-15 a seat a month buys real MCP access and a workspace where ten-plus AI agents sit as named teammates on your issues, but every coding session draws from a separate USD credit meter Linear only shipped in June 2026 and already renamed once — the agent platform is ahead of the billing model.
PRICING
| Free | $0 | Unlimited members, 2 teams, 250 issues, Agent platform, Linear Agent, MCP access |
| Basic | $10/user/mo | billed yearly; 5 teams, unlimited issues, unlimited uploads, admin roles, Coding sessions (credit-metered) |
| Business | $16/user/mo | billed yearly; unlimited teams, private teams & guests, Triage Intelligence, Loops (credit-metered), Code Intelligence (beta), Linear Insights, Linear Asks, Zendesk/Intercom integrations |
| Enterprise | Custom | SAML/SCIM, HIPAA compliance, audit log, priority support, account management |
AI credits are a separate, opt-in, prepaid usage meter for Coding Sessions (Basic+) and Loops (Business+) — official typical costs are $0.07-$0.20 per loop run and $0.50-$5+ per coding session depending on model and complexity. Workspaces that never top up simply don't get these two features; MCP access, the base Linear Agent, and Triage Intelligence are included in the seat price. Linear renamed 'Linear Agent automations (beta)' to 'Loops' and moved it behind the credit meter on 29/07/2026, per an independent pricing tracker — a sign the AI pricing model is still being adjusted.
checked 2026-08-06 · vendor pricing page
Element scores
Strengths
The deepest agent-as-teammate model RXed has audited in this category: Linear's own agent plus ten-plus third-party agents (Cursor, OpenAI Codex, Devin, Sentry Seer, ChatPRD, Warp's Oz, Factory, Charlie, Ranger, Tembo) sit in the same workspace as named contributors, assignable to issues and orchestrated across a backlog. MCP access and the base agent platform are included from the Free tier — unusually generous. Vector-embedding similar-issue detection, reusable agent 'skills,' and a public Agent API for building custom teammates round out a platform, not a bolted-on feature.
Honest dings
No house model — every AI capability rides on Anthropic or OpenAI, selected by workspace admins, so quality and privacy posture shift with whichever model they pick. Coding Sessions and Loops sit behind a separate, USD-denominated prepaid AI-credit meter on top of the seat price, and Linear re-metered one feature mid-2026 shortly after launch, a sign the AI pricing model is still moving. Multimodal understanding, small/cheap model options, and genuine interpretability tooling are all thin.
Sources
Every audit lists the research it rests on — transparency and traceability are the product. Tools evolve: each audit is a snapshot of its audit date, and re-audits supersede older versions (kept below for reference).
- linear.app/pricing — Official pricing page: Free/Basic $10/Business $16/Enterprise custom, full feature matrix, 40,000+ companies claim (accessed 2026-08-06)
- linear.app/agents — Official Agents page: delegate-not-abdicate accountability model, tracing/reasoning inspection claim, named third-party agent roster, build-your-own-agent via API (accessed 2026-08-06)
- linear.app/docs/coding-sessions — Official docs: selectable models (Claude Fable 5, Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4), zero-data-retention default, plan availability (accessed 2026-08-06)
- linear.app/docs/ai-credits — Official docs: AI credit mechanics, typical costs per task, which features are credit-metered vs. included in seat price (accessed 2026-08-06)
- linear.app/now/using-ai-to-detect-similar-issues — Official engineering blog: Similar Issues feature built on LLM-generated vector embeddings and cosine similarity (accessed 2026-08-06)
- usagepricing.com/blueprint/linear — Independent pricing tracker: confirms Free-tier MCP/Agent inclusion, documents the 29/07/2026 Loops rename and re-metering (accessed 2026-08-06)
- getlatka.com/companies/linear.app — Unofficial revenue/valuation/employee estimates ($100M ARR, $1.3B valuation, ~118 employees) — used as directional context only, flagged as third-party estimate not an official company statement (accessed 2026-08-06)
- finance.yahoo.com/news/atlassian-competitor-linear-… — Reuters, via Yahoo Finance: official Series C $82M at $1.25B valuation, company-stated 15,000+ customers (2025), founders Karri Saarinen/Tuomas Artman/Jori Lallo, San Francisco HQ (accessed 2026-08-06)
- remote-mcp.com/servers/linear — Independent MCP directory: confirms official Linear MCP server, OAuth 2.1 auth, 21 available tools (accessed 2026-08-06)
- lifestack.ai/blog/linear-pricing — Independent pricing breakdown corroborating Free/Basic/Business/Enterprise structure and annual-billing terms (accessed 2026-08-06)