What you actually pay for

There is a version of this post we could have written that would have been more fun to read and less true. It goes: software should never charge per person, LinearPilot charges one flat price for your whole company, hire freely. We used to say something close to that. It is not what the product does, so here is the actual structure.

LinearPilot is sold as one subscription per company. You pick a plan, the company pays for it, and that plan comes with a number of seats included in the price. Below that number, adding a colleague costs nothing extra — which is the part of the flat-pricing idea that survives, and the part that changes behaviour. Above it, each additional seat carries a flat monthly price, the same price on every paid plan. Not a percentage, not a different rate per tier, not a negotiation. One number per extra person.

This post deliberately doesn't reprint the plan table. A table copied into an article goes stale the first time anything is repriced, and it goes stale quietly, still reading like fact months after it stopped being one. The pricing page is generated from the live plan data, which makes it the only version worth quoting — the prices, the included seats, the ceilings, the storage and the AI allowance comparisons there are read from the same rows the product enforces, not from a copy someone remembered to update.

Every plan also has a ceiling: a maximum number of people, separate from the number included. Included headcount is what the base price buys, and the ceiling is where that plan stops. When you reach it, you move up a plan rather than buying your way past it. It is worth knowing both numbers exist, because they are not the same number on any plan and the gap between them is the range where extra seats apply.

The second thing you are paying for is AI, and it is metered separately, in credits. A credit is a unit of AI work anchored to what the work actually costs to run, which is why the same question consumes more credits on the most capable model tier than on the fastest one. Each plan comes with a credit allowance. Adding people does not raise it, and a separate post explains why extra seats stopped adding credits in September. There is a longer post on how the tiers and the meter fit together if you want the mechanism.

One honest note about billing as it stands today. Nothing charges for a seat above your included headcount. The extra-seat price is published and quotable, but no invoice carries it, so extra people add nothing to your bill, and nothing to your credit allowance either. The credit meter itself is now live: the arithmetic runs, and refusals name the shield that tripped rather than showing a generic wall. We will keep this paragraph honest as billing changes.

None of this means unlimited. Every plan has a headcount ceiling, a storage allowance and an AI allowance, and you grow into the next tier as you get bigger. That is meant to be an ordinary event rather than a penalty: the same flat price at the next size up, not a surcharge for having done well. It is also worth saying that the storage allowance is reported to you rather than enforced as a hard stop — we measure it and show it, we do not currently block an upload at the line.

The free plan is worth calling out on its own, because “free” is usually hiding a countdown. LinearPilot's free plan is a real, permanent plan rather than a trial that expires and starts charging you: after any promotional window ends, the plan itself is still there. What is a genuine trial is a first-week credit uplift — new signups get the weekly credit shape of the first paid tier for seven days, so you can feel what running on a paid allowance is like before deciding, and only the credits change during that week. Seats and storage stay on Free the whole time, and no card is asked for. After the week, the credit shape drops to Free's monthly allowance and the plan otherwise stays exactly as it was. You move up when you outgrow it, not when a timer runs out.

Where is the price designed to scale, then? Two places, and neither of them is “you hired someone useful.” One is people beyond what your plan includes, at a flat and published rate you can multiply in your head, though as above that rate is not billed today. The other is how hard you lean on the assistant, which feels like the right place for cost to live, because it tracks how much the platform is actually doing for you.

The claim we are willing to make is narrow and, we think, more useful than the one we replaced. It is not that LinearPilot never charges per person. It is that the arithmetic is small enough to do before you commit: a plan price, a known number of included seats, a flat rate above that, and a credit allowance set by the plan rather than by headcount.