Linear Free Gives You 250 Issues. They Never Come Back.
Linear's free plan is not a monthly allowance. It is 250 issues for the life of the workspace, and when you reach it, new issues stop being accepted from every entry point.
Linear's free plan costs $0 and includes unlimited members, two teams, 250 issues, 10MB uploads and the agent platform. The 250 is workspace-wide and never resets. It counts Done and Canceled issues, and when it is reached new issues fail through the API, Slack and GitHub. Basic is $10 per user a month yearly.1
Most free tiers meter something you consume periodically. Storage, requests, messages. You approach the limit, you wait for the counter to reset, you carry on.
Linear meters something that only accumulates. Every issue you have ever filed still occupies a slot unless you archive it, which makes the free plan finite in a way that is easy to miss for the first year and impossible to miss afterwards.
What the free plan actually includes
| Free | Basic | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $10/user/mo yearly, $12 monthly |
| Members | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Teams | 2 | 5 |
| Issues | 250 workspace-wide, no reset | Unlimited |
| File uploads | 10MB per file | Unlimited |
| Admin roles | No | Yes |
| Agent platform | Included | Included |
| Issue history | Included | Included |
People are free, which is unusual and worth noticing. A ten-person startup pays nothing for seats. Two teams means a product team and an engineering team, or engineering and design, and that is usually all a small company has.
The agent platform is included on every plan, including free. Linear has made AI agents a first-class feature rather than an upsell, which puts it ahead of most trackers at this price.
250 issues is not a monthly allowance
Linear's documentation is clear and the wording matters. The limit applies across the whole workspace, not per team, so splitting work into two teams does not buy you another 250.
Archived issues are excluded. Everything else counts, including issues that are Done and Canceled. A team that closes 200 issues and opens 60 more ends the quarter at 250, not at 60.
Because the counter never resets, the free plan has a lifespan in active teams. At twenty issues a month you have about a year. At fifty you have five months.
When you hit 250, issue creation fails quietly
This is the part that catches teams out. Linear does not silently archive old work or start dropping issues. It refuses new ones.
Creation through the API fails. Creation from the Slack integration fails. Creation by a GitHub issue sync fails. From the outside this looks like an integration bug rather than a billing state, and the fix is either archiving issues or upgrading.
Archiving is the honest escape hatch. If your backlog is full of issues that will never be worked on, archive them and reclaim the slots. Most workspaces that have been running for a year have a hundred or more of those.
What Basic buys at $10
Removing the issue cap is the headline, and unlimited uploads follows closely for anyone attaching screenshots and logs.
Five teams instead of two, and admin roles, which matter once someone other than the founder needs to manage workspace settings without being able to see everything.
At $10 per user a month billed yearly, a five-person team pays $600 a year. That is the jump: from nothing to a real line item, at the moment the workspace stops being able to accept work.
When the free plan is enough
A team of five or fewer running one or two active projects. A side project with a backlog measured in dozens rather than hundreds.
Free is also genuinely good for evaluating Linear, because nothing about the interface, the keyboard-driven workflow or the agent features is held back. You are trialling the real product. Once bugs start arriving as issues, Sentry's single-user free tier is where they get their stack traces.
When it stops being enough
The day the API returns an error on issue creation and someone asks why. That is later than it should be, because the failure does not announce itself as a quota.
If your team is still arguing about whether to adopt Linear at all, this is a different decision from the one Notion's free plan poses, where the product is the tool the team already lives in. Linear is worth the switch only if issue tracking is the problem you have.
Frequently asked questions
Does Linear's 250 issue limit reset every month?
No. It is a workspace-wide total that never resets. Issues stay counted until you archive them or upgrade.
Do archived issues count toward the 250?
No. Archiving is excluded, and it is the only way to free up slots without paying.
Do Done and Canceled issues count?
Yes. Status does not matter; the issue exists until it is archived.
Is Linear free for unlimited users?
Yes. Members do not count against the free plan. Teams do, and so do issues.
What does Linear Basic cost?
$10 per user per month billed yearly, or $12 month to month. Business is $16 yearly, $18 monthly.
Plan contents, issue counting rules and pricing verified against Linear's pricing page and its plans documentation on 20 October 2026.
Sources
- Linear pricing: linear.app/pricing. Used for: Free plan limits, the workspace-wide 250 issue cap and the $10 Basic price.
All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 20 October 2026. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.
