Stack cost

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.

What it costs

A five-person team on Notion Plus, Slack Pro and Trello Premium pays $156.25 a month, or $1,875 a year, at the list rates checked on 21 August 2026 with monthly billing. Committing annually where the vendor publishes an annual rate brings that to about $1,635. Polaris replaces all three at $0 and bills only for work an AI worker delivers.

Monthly billing: $1,875 / year
Annual billing: About $1,635 / year
Per person: $375 / year
Prices checked: 21 August 2026

The stack, line by line

Rates read from each vendor's pricing page on 21 August 2026. Notion displays a single per-member rate with a yearly toggle marked "Save up to 20% with yearly" and does not print the yearly figure, so its annual column is expressed as the discount rather than a number we would be inventing.

Notion Plus$50.00
Slack Pro$43.75
Trello Premium$62.50
Total, monthly billing$156.25
Slack Pro, annual$36.25
Trello Premium, annual$50.00
Total with annual commitments$136.25
Polaris$0.00

Tool and plan by per month.

Tool and plan	Rate	Basis	Seats	Per month	Per year
Notion Plus	$10.00 / member / month	As displayed	5	$50.00	$600.00
Slack Pro	$8.75 / active user / month	Monthly	5	$43.75	$525.00
Trello Premium	$12.50 / user / month	Monthly	5	$62.50	$750.00
Total, monthly billing			5	$156.25	$1,875.00
Slack Pro, annual	$7.25 / active user / month	Annual	5	$36.25	$435.00
Trello Premium, annual	$10.00 / user / month	Annual	5	$50.00	$600.00
Total with annual commitments			5	$136.25	$1,635.00
Polaris	$0	No seats	unlimited	$0.00	$0.00

What $375 a person a year actually buys

Three places to put work. Notion holds what you wrote down, Trello holds what you agreed to do, Slack holds the conversation where you decided it. None of the three does any of the work, and at five people that is fine, because five people can hold the whole context in their heads and the tools are just filing.

The awkward part is that this is the cheapest the stack will ever be. At ten people the same three subscriptions cost more than twice this, because Notion Plus stops being enough and Slack's history limit stops being survivable.

The same stack as you grow

Comparable stacks from the other pages in this cluster, all at list prices checked 21 August 2026.

$1,875

5 people

Notion Plus, Slack Pro, Trello Premium, monthly billing

$4,650

10 people

Notion Business, Slack Pro, Linear Basic

$15,447

25 people

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

$37,200

50 people

Plus Claude Team and GitHub Copilot seats

The illustrative Polaris side

Polaris is in free public beta with no customers and no usage data. The figures below are arithmetic on a stated assumption, not measurements.

The software line is $0, and that part is not an estimate
Unlimited humans, tasks, workstreams, docs, connections and the Chief of Staff cost nothing. No seats, no tiers, no upgrade wall.
If your workers delivered 20 human-hours a month
That would be about $40 a month, or $480 a year, at roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour. Against $1,875 for the three subscriptions, illustrative only.
If your workers delivered 40 human-hours a month
About $80 a month, or $960 a year. Still roughly half the stack it replaced, and this time the invoice names what got produced.
If nobody assigns anything, the bill is zero
That is not a promotion. It is how the meter works: nothing delivered, nothing billed.

What changes at five people

Three subscriptions

$1,875 a year before anyone buys an AI subscription
Context split across three products and three search boxes
Every new hire adds three seat charges at once
Nothing on any of the three invoices names an output

One free workspace

Tasks, docs and team chat in a single product at $0
Focus lane pinned first: today, this week, next 30 days
Slack still connects, so signals arrive as prefilled task suggestions
AI workers on the same member list as the humans

Where to go next

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.

Notion pricing, checked August 2026

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

Slack pricing, checked August 2026

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

Trello pricing, checked August 2026

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

Polaris for startups

Your next hire takes about sixty seconds and costs nothing in the weeks it has nothing to do.

Polaris for solo founders

Being the whole org chart is not a time problem. It is an accountability problem.

Questions people ask

+How is the $1,875 calculated?

Notion Plus at $10 per member per month, Slack Pro at $8.75 per active user per month on monthly billing, and Trello Premium at $12.50 per user per month on monthly billing, each multiplied by five seats and then by twelve. All three rates were read from the vendors' own pricing pages on 21 August 2026.

+Would a different five-person stack cost less?

Yes. Trello Standard instead of Premium saves $6.50 per person per month, and staying on Slack Free saves the whole Slack line until the 90-day history limit bites. This page models the configuration most five-person teams actually end up on rather than the cheapest one available.

+Is the Polaris comparison a real figure?

The $0 software line is real and unconditional. The usage figures are illustrative arithmetic on a stated assumption, because Polaris is in free public beta with no customers and no published usage data. Anyone presenting a Polaris monthly bill as a measurement is making it up.

+How do I know the AI worker hours are not inflated?

Each job logs its own inputs, and the formula that turns them into hours is published: base pickup time, searches, characters of finished prose, checklist items, comments and files, clamped between five minutes and eight hours per session. You can recompute any line from the work log and challenge it.

+What happens when an AI worker delivers something unusable?

You do not close the task. Agents deliver and humans close in Polaris, so the machine posts its work as a comment and ticks its acceptance criteria, and a person decides whether that is finished. Rejected work stays open and disputable.