Cost

What your work stack actually costs

Sixteen pages of pricing arithmetic you can check yourself, with the billing basis named on every row.

What it costs

Polaris costs nothing to run and bills roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour an AI worker delivers. A five-person stack of Notion, Slack and Trello runs about $1,875 a year at the list prices checked in August 2026, and a fifty-person stack with AI subscriptions passes $37,000. These pages show the arithmetic, name the billing basis, and label every estimate.

Pricing pages: 16
Polaris software: $0, no seats
Polaris billing: ~$2 per human-hour delivered
Prices checked: 21 August 2026

Why most pricing comparisons are wrong

Vendors quote the annual-billing rate in large type and the monthly rate behind a toggle. The gap is real money: Slack Pro is $7.25 per active user per month on annual billing and $8.75 on monthly, and Asana Starter is $10.99 annual against $13.49 monthly. A comparison page that mixes the two produces a number that matches nobody's invoice.

So every row in this cluster carries its billing basis. Where a vendor shows only the annual rate, the page says only the annual rate. Where a vendor publishes no list price at all, the page says that too, and quotes nothing.

Four stacks, four totals

List prices checked 21 August 2026, arithmetic shown in full on each page.

$1,875

5 people / year

Notion Plus, Slack Pro, Trello Premium, monthly billing

$4,650

10 people / year

Notion Business, Slack Pro, Linear Basic

$15,447

25 people / year

Notion Business, Slack Business+, Asana Starter, monthly billing

$37,200

50 people / year

Same three plus Claude Team and Copilot seats

How these pages are built

The same discipline on all sixteen.

The vendor's own page, or nothing
Every figure came from the vendor's pricing page on 21 August 2026. Atlassian publishes no readable per-user list price for Jira or Confluence, so those two pages quote none and explain the calculator instead.
The multiplication is on the page
Rate, billing basis, seat count, monthly subtotal, annual subtotal. You can check a stack-cost page line by line without leaving it.
Polaris usage numbers are labelled illustrative
Polaris is in free public beta with no customers and no usage data. Where a page models a monthly bill it states the assumption out loud, in the sentence before the number.
The hours formula is printed, not summarised
Base pickup time, searches, finished prose, checklist items, comments and files, with the clamps. It is on the page so you can argue with it.

Two things a bill can charge for

A place to put work

Priced per seat, so the bill tracks headcount
A second tool doubles the seat count, a third triples it
AI arrives as another per-seat line on top of the base plan
The invoice never tells you what got done

Work that came back finished

Software at zero, with no seat count and no tier
Billing starts when an AI worker delivers something
Hours estimated by a published formula, logged job by job
Nothing delivered means nothing billed

Every cost page

Nine vendor pricing breakdowns, four stack totals by team size, three pages on the pricing models themselves.

Notion pricing, checked August 2026

Two seat prices and a second meter for AI, which is the part that surprises people on renewal.

Jira pricing, checked August 2026

The only vendor in this cluster whose per-user price you cannot read off a page.

Linear pricing, checked August 2026

A generous free tier with two hard caps, and paid rates published on yearly billing only.

Slack pricing, checked August 2026

The one vendor here that bills per active user, which helps more than most people realise.

Asana pricing, checked August 2026

One of the few vendors that prints both billing rates, and the gap is twenty-three percent.

ClickUp pricing, checked August 2026

Cheap seats with an AI add-on that can cost more than the seat it sits on.

monday.com pricing, checked August 2026

Seats sold in blocks, AI sold in credits, and four separate products under one brand.

Confluence pricing, checked August 2026

Priced by a function rather than a number, and bundled with the rest of Atlassian by design.

Trello pricing, checked August 2026

The cheapest tracker on this list, and the one teams outgrow fastest.

Tool stack cost for a 5-person team

Three subscriptions, five people, and the arithmetic laid out so you can check it against your own invoices.

Tool stack cost for a 10-person team

The size where the free tiers run out on all three products at roughly the same time.

Tool stack cost for a 25-person team

The size where paying monthly instead of annually costs $1,650 a year on its own.

Tool stack cost for a 50-person team

Three work tools and two AI subscriptions, which is where most companies of this size actually are.

Per-seat pricing and usage pricing charge for different things

One model prices access. The other prices output. Almost every argument about software cost is really about which of those you are buying.

The cost of AI subscriptions for a team

Five figures a year at fifty people, and no shared record of what any of it produced.

What an AI worker costs, and how the hours are counted

The whole formula is on this page, including the parts that make it an estimate rather than a measurement.

Alternatives to the work tools you pay for by the seat

Sixteen pages about tools teams leave, what leaving actually costs, and when leaving is the wrong call.

Replacing the stack you already pay for

Every plan here says which of your tools has an importer, which has a connector, and which has neither.

Per-seat pricing

The bill tracks headcount, which is only a proxy for value received.

Usage-based pricing

The bill follows consumption, which cuts both ways for buyer and vendor.

Human-equivalent hours

A billing unit denominated in the work replaced, not the compute consumed.

Tool sprawl

The expensive part is not the licences. It is that nothing is authoritative any more.

Questions people ask

+Is the Polaris software really free, or is there a seat charge hiding somewhere?

There is no seat charge. Unlimited humans, tasks, workstreams, docs, connections and the Chief of Staff are included in every organisation at no cost. The only revenue line is roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour that an AI worker delivers, and nothing delivered means nothing billed.

+How do I know the hours are not inflated?

The formula is published and every job writes its own inputs to the work log: how many searches ran, how many characters of finished prose came back, how many checklist items were ticked, how many comments and files were produced. You can recompute any line yourself and challenge it. That is the whole reason the formula is simple rather than clever.

+What happens if an AI worker does bad work?

You do not close the task. Agents deliver and humans close, always, in both directions of the product: the machine posts its work as a comment and ticks acceptance criteria, and a person decides whether that counts. You close the task and rate it, or you send it back.

+Why do your competitor prices differ from other comparison sites?

Most comparison pages quote the annual-billing rate as if it were the monthly price, which understates a monthly-billed invoice by twenty to twenty-five percent on several of these vendors. Every row here names its billing basis, and the check date is 21 August 2026.

+Can I keep the tools I already pay for?

Yes, and for most teams that is the sensible first move. Slack, Notion, Linear, GitHub, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Figma, HubSpot, Stripe, Supabase, WhatsApp and Instagram are all in the Polaris connection catalog, so an AI worker can use them without anyone migrating anything. The saving only appears when you stop paying for a seat somewhere.