Can fifty people share AI workers, or is it per person?

Shared. AI workers are members of the organisation, on the same roster as the humans, and anyone can assign a task to one. There are no AI seats to allocate, so the argument about who gets access does not exist.

Stack cost

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.

What it costs

A fifty-person team on Notion Business, Slack Business+ and Linear Business pays $2,550 a month for work tools. Adding twenty Claude Team seats and fifteen GitHub Copilot Pro seats brings it to $3,100 a month, or $37,200 a year, at list rates checked 21 August 2026. Polaris covers the first three at $0 and meters AI work by the hour delivered.

Work tools: $30,600 / year
AI subscriptions: $6,600 / year
Total: $37,200 / year
Per person: $744 / year

The full stack, line by line

Rates read from each vendor's own pricing page on 21 August 2026. Slack and Linear rows use the annual-billing rate each vendor publishes; Notion shows one rate with a yearly toggle and no printed yearly figure.

Notion Business$1,000.00
Slack Business+$750.00
Linear Business$800.00
Work tools subtotal$2,550.00
Claude Team, standard seat$400.00
GitHub Copilot Pro$150.00
AI subtotal$550.00
Total$3,100.00
Polaris software$0.00

Line by per month.

Line	Rate	Basis	Seats	Per month	Per year
Notion Business	$20.00 / member / month	As displayed	50	$1,000.00	$12,000.00
Slack Business+	$15.00 / active user / month	Annual	50	$750.00	$9,000.00
Linear Business	$16.00 / user / month	Billed yearly	50	$800.00	$9,600.00
Work tools subtotal			50	$2,550.00	$30,600.00
Claude Team, standard seat	$20.00 / seat / month	Annual	20	$400.00	$4,800.00
GitHub Copilot Pro	$10.00 / user / month	Monthly	15	$150.00	$1,800.00
AI subtotal			35 of 50	$550.00	$6,600.00
Total			50	$3,100.00	$37,200.00
Polaris software	$0	No seats	unlimited	$0.00	$0.00

At fifty people the AI layer is a fifth of the bill

Twenty Claude Team seats and fifteen Copilot Pro seats is a conservative configuration for a fifty-person company in 2026, and it comes to $6,600 a year. That is more than the entire tool stack of the five-person team in this cluster, and it buys access rather than output: a seat costs the same whether the person behind it ran two prompts this month or two hundred.

It also stays on individual machines. Claude Code, Copilot and Cursor are extraordinary single-player tools, and none of them leaves an artefact your teammates can assign work to, review, or audit six months later.

Four things that get expensive specifically at fifty

Business tiers become mandatory, not optional
SSO, SCIM, audit logs and granular permissions live on the higher tier of every product here. At fifty people that is a security requirement, so the $20 and $18 and $16 rates are not really choices.
Partial AI rollout is a permanent argument
Thirty-five of fifty people have an AI subscription in this model. Deciding who gets one is a recurring management task that exists only because the pricing is per seat.
Nobody can audit what the AI produced
Five figures a year on AI subscriptions, and no shared record of what came out of them. No work log, no deliverable attached to a task, no way to answer what the money bought.
Every hire adds five lines
Three work tools plus, increasingly, two AI subscriptions. The fifty-first person is roughly $744 a year before they open anything.

The illustrative Polaris side

Polaris is in free public beta with no customers and no usage data. Every hour figure below is arithmetic on the assumption stated in the row.

Software for all fifty people$0.00
Illustrative: workers deliver 150 human-hours a month~$300.00
Illustrative: workers deliver 300 human-hours a month~$600.00
Illustrative: workers deliver 600 human-hours a month~$1,200.00
Illustrative: 1,600 human-hours a month, ten FTE-months~$3,200.00

Assumption by per month.

Assumption	Per month	Per year	Versus $37,200
Software for all fifty people	$0.00	$0.00	Real, unconditional
Illustrative: workers deliver 150 human-hours a month	~$300.00	~$3,600.00	About 10%
Illustrative: workers deliver 300 human-hours a month	~$600.00	~$7,200.00	About 19%
Illustrative: workers deliver 600 human-hours a month	~$1,200.00	~$14,400.00	About 39%
Illustrative: 1,600 human-hours a month, ten FTE-months	~$3,200.00	~$38,400.00	Roughly the same money, for delivered work

What $37,200 buys, two ways

Five subscriptions

Three places to put work and two AI tools that stay on laptops
$744 per person per year, rising with every hire
AI priced by access, so usage and cost are unrelated
No shared record of what any of the AI spend produced

One workspace, metered output

Tasks, docs and team chat at $0 for all fifty
AI workers on the same member list as the humans, assigned identically
A real cloud machine wakes per task and keeps working after laptops close
Every billed hour attached to a job, with its inputs on the work log

Where to go next

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.

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 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.

Linear pricing, checked August 2026

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

Turning a single-player agent into a team member

The change is not a better prompt. It is putting the worker in the same table as the people.

Polaris for software teams

Nobody joined your team to write the release notes. Something still has to write them.

Questions people ask

+How is the $37,200 calculated?

Notion Business at $20 per member per month on fifty seats, Slack Business+ at $15 annual on fifty, Linear Business at $16 billed yearly on fifty, Claude Team standard seats at $20 annual on twenty, and GitHub Copilot Pro at $10 on fifteen. That is $3,100 a month, times twelve. All rates were read from vendor pricing pages on 21 August 2026.

+Why only thirty-five AI seats for fifty people?

Because that is what partial rollout looks like in practice, and it is the honest version. Giving all fifty people both subscriptions would put the AI line at $18,000 a year instead of $6,600. The model here is deliberately conservative.

+Would Polaris really be cheaper at this size?

The software line would be zero, which is $30,600 of the $37,200. Whether the metered work costs more or less than $6,600 a year depends entirely on how much work you assign, and the last row of the illustrative table shows a volume where it costs about the same. We have no usage data and will not pretend otherwise.

+How does a fifty-person company audit AI spend in Polaris?

Through the work log. Every job records the searches run, the finished prose delivered, the acceptance-criteria items ticked, the comments addressed and the files produced, and the formula that converts those into hours is published. Any line on the bill can be traced to a task somebody closed.