Stack cost

Tool stack cost for a 25-person team

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

What it costs

A twenty-five person team on Notion Business, Slack Business+ and Asana Starter pays $1,287.25 a month, or $15,447 a year, at the list rates checked on 21 August 2026 with monthly billing. Committing annually where the rates are published brings it to $13,797, a difference of $1,650. Polaris replaces the three at $0 for the software.

Monthly billing: $15,447 / year
Annual billing: $13,797 / year
Cost of paying monthly: $1,650 / year
Prices checked: 21 August 2026

The stack on both billing bases

Rates read from each vendor's own pricing page on 21 August 2026. Notion displays one per-member rate with a yearly toggle marked "Save up to 20% with yearly" and prints no yearly figure, so its rate is unchanged across both columns here rather than guessed.

Notion Business$500.00
Slack Business+$450.00
Asana Starter$337.25
Total per month$1,287.25
Total per year$15,447.00
Per person per year$617.88
Polaris software$0.00

Tool and plan by monthly total.

Tool and plan	Monthly-billing rate	Annual-billing rate	Seats	Monthly total	Annual total
Notion Business	$20.00	As displayed, up to 20% less	25	$500.00	$500.00
Slack Business+	$18.00	$15.00	25	$450.00	$375.00
Asana Starter	$13.49	$10.99	25	$337.25	$274.75
Total per month			25	$1,287.25	$1,149.75
Total per year			25	$15,447.00	$13,797.00
Per person per year			25	$617.88	$551.88
Polaris software	$0	$0	unlimited	$0.00	$0.00

The $1,650 nobody negotiates

Slack Business+ is $18 per active user per month on monthly billing and $15 on annual. Asana Starter is $13.49 against $10.99. Those two gaps alone are $1,650 a year on twenty-five seats, which is more than most teams spend on their entire design tooling, and it is spent purely on the option to cancel.

Sometimes that option is worth buying, particularly during a reorganisation. What is not defensible is paying it by accident, which is the usual reason it appears on an invoice.

Where the money leaks at twenty-five people

Tier drift
Slack Business+ at $18 rather than Pro at $8.75 is usually bought for SSO and compliance controls, then paid on every seat including the ones that never touch a compliance feature. It is the single largest line in this stack.
Seats that outlived their people
Slack credits you when someone goes inactive for a full 28-day window. Notion and Asana do not. At twenty-five people there are almost always two or three seats belonging to someone who left or moved.
The fourth subscription
This stack has three tools in it. Most twenty-five person companies also pay for a design tool, a CRM, and a growing pile of AI subscriptions. The cost-of-AI-subscriptions page in this cluster models that layer separately.

The illustrative Polaris side

Polaris is in free public beta with no customers and no usage data. Every row is arithmetic on the assumption stated in it, not a measurement.

Software for all twenty-five people$0.00
Illustrative: workers deliver 80 human-hours a month~$160.00
Illustrative: workers deliver 160 human-hours a month~$320.00
Illustrative: workers deliver 320 human-hours a month~$640.00
Illustrative: one full-time-equivalent month of delivered work~$320.00

Assumption by per month.

Assumption	Per month	Per year	Versus $13,797 annual-billing stack
Software for all twenty-five people	$0.00	$0.00	Real, unconditional, not an estimate
Illustrative: workers deliver 80 human-hours a month	~$160.00	~$1,920.00	About 14%
Illustrative: workers deliver 160 human-hours a month	~$320.00	~$3,840.00	About 28%
Illustrative: workers deliver 320 human-hours a month	~$640.00	~$7,680.00	About 56%
Illustrative: one full-time-equivalent month of delivered work	~$320.00	~$3,840.00	160 hours at roughly $2 an hour

Two ways to spend $13,797

Three subscriptions for twenty-five people

$551.88 per person per year, whether they log in or not
Three products, three search boxes, three permission models
A twenty-sixth hire adds three more seat charges
No invoice line corresponds to anything that got done

One free workspace plus metered work

$0 for the software at twenty-five people or two hundred
Tasks, docs and team chat in one product with one permission model
AI workers on the same member list, assigned the same way
Each billed hour attached to a named job you can audit

Where to go next

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.

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.

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.

Asana pricing, checked August 2026

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

Slack pricing, checked August 2026

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

Polaris for remote teams

The problem was never the meetings. It is what happens to a decision made while half the team is asleep.

Questions people ask

+How is the $15,447 calculated?

Notion Business at $20 per member per month, Slack Business+ at $18 per active user per month on monthly billing, and Asana Starter at $13.49 per user per month on monthly billing, each times twenty-five seats and then times twelve. Rates were read from the vendors' pricing pages on 21 August 2026.

+Why is the annual figure only $1,650 lower?

Because only two of the three vendors publish a separate annual rate. Slack drops from $18 to $15 and Asana from $13.49 to $10.99, which is $1,650 a year across twenty-five seats. Notion shows one rate with a yearly toggle marked up to twenty percent off but prints no yearly figure, so this page leaves the Notion line unchanged rather than inventing one.

+Is the Polaris usage column real data?

No. Polaris is in free public beta with no customers and no published usage data, so every hour figure here is arithmetic on an assumption written into the row. The $0 software line is real and applies at any headcount.

+How do I know the delivered hours are not inflated?

Because the estimate is mechanical and published. Fifteen minutes of base pickup time, twelve minutes per web search, finished prose at about ninety characters a minute, eight minutes per acceptance-criteria item, ten minutes per comment and per file, five per PDF, clamped between five minutes and eight hours per session. Each job's inputs are on the work log, so any line can be recomputed and challenged.

+What if an AI worker delivers bad work at this scale?

The same thing as at any scale: you do not close the task. Agents deliver and humans close in Polaris. The worker posts its result as a comment and ticks its acceptance criteria; a person decides whether that counts as done and rates it.