A free project tracker is a small economic bargain dressed up as a blank workspace. You bring the backlog, the bugs, the customer complaints and the embarrassing tickets that seemed sensible three quarters ago. The software brings a point of view about when you should start paying. Look at that boundary closely and you can see the customer each company wants to keep.
For years, the easy contrast was that Jira gave tiny teams a lasting free home while Linear charged the moment a serious company arrived. That picture is now out of date. Linear's current pricing page advertises a Free plan with unlimited members. The constraint has moved somewhere more interesting: two teams, 250 issues and 10 MB file uploads. Linear no longer taxes the eleventh colleague on the free tier. It taxes accumulated work.
Shortcut and Jira draw a more familiar line around headcount. Shortcut says its Free plan is available for teams of up to 10 people. Jira is also free forever for up to 10 users, with 2 GB of storage and community support. The zero on all three pricing pages therefore conceals three different questions. How fast do you hire? How fast do you create issues? How much administration do you need before either number becomes uncomfortable?
The free tier is the first product spec
Pricing pages are often read after feature pages, as if money were an implementation detail. Reverse the order. A free limit changes behavior before it generates revenue. A seat limit encourages a team to ration access, invite fewer stakeholders or keep adjacent departments elsewhere. An issue limit encourages archiving, pruning and a shorter organizational memory. A permissions limit lets everybody in, but reserves control for buyers.
History gate
Unlimited members, but 250 issues and two teams on Free.
Headcount gate
Free for a software team of up to 10 people.
Control gate
Up to 10 users, with lighter permissions, storage and support.
Consider a bootstrapped studio with six people. It may remain below a 10-seat ceiling for years, but can produce 250 issues in a few busy months. Bugs, experiments, chores and product ideas are not merely rows in a database. Together they become a rough record of why the software is the way it is. Reaching Linear's cap can happen while the payroll still fits around a kitchen table.
Now consider a 14-person funded startup whose product is new and whose issue history is still thin. Linear can admit everyone for free, at least until the issue counter fills. Shortcut and Jira ask that team to cross a paid threshold sooner because people, rather than stored work, are the scarce unit. The old idea that Linear's pricing automatically favors funded companies survives only in a changed form. Funded teams may still tolerate paid seats more easily, but Linear's free plan now gives a larger young team a real trial runway.
Linear moved the tollbooth from the org chart to the company memory.YesPress analysis of current public plans
Linear sells a compact grammar
Linear's appeal begins with a deliberately compact model of product development. Issues belong to teams. Cycles create a repeating near-term rhythm. Projects collect work around an outcome. Initiatives connect projects to a broader goal. Its documentation says cycles are similar to agile sprints but are not tied to releases, and can run from one to eight weeks. That distinction captures the product's temperament: maintain momentum, reduce planning ceremony and keep shipping separate from the calendar ritual.
The paid step is direct. Basic is listed at $10 per user per month when billed yearly. It removes the issue ceiling, raises the workspace to five teams, permits unlimited file uploads and adds admin roles. Business, at $16 per user per month billed yearly, opens unlimited teams along with private teams, guests and a longer list of intelligence, analytics and support-workflow features.
The practical lesson is not that 250 is stingy or generous. It is that Linear wants the free workspace to prove its interaction model, not become an indefinite archive for an active product company. Once the product becomes the place where work history lives, unlimited issues are the first paid necessity. The upgrade is attached to habit.
Shortcut owns the middle
Shortcut presents a recognizable software-team kit without asking buyers to adopt Jira's full administrative universe. Its Free plan includes Kanban views, a roadmap, reports, iterations, docs and integrations with GitHub, Slack and Figma. The vocabulary is comfortable for product and engineering teams: Stories, iterations, objectives and roadmaps. A small team can describe both the work and why it matters without constructing an internal Jira consultancy.
At 11 people, the arithmetic becomes visible. Shortcut lists Team at $8.50 per user per month on annual billing. That level adds a broader report suite, work-in-progress limits, multiple custom workflows, automations and all integrations. Business is $12 per user per month annually and adds unlimited everything, strategic objectives, advanced custom fields, advanced reporting and multiple workspaces.
The first paid rung
Per user/month as displayed on public pricing pages, with annual billing selected where stated. Enterprise and add-on costs excluded. Prices can change.
Shortcut is easiest to understand when the team and the company are nearly the same thing. Its free boundary gives a bootstrapped team a useful runway, and its first paid plan adds operational sophistication without immediately pushing the buyer toward enterprise governance. It can be less attractive if many occasional collaborators need accounts, because a headcount meter does not distinguish a daily engineer from a stakeholder who checks a roadmap once a week.
Jira is cheap because the universe is large
Jira's free offer is unusually durable for a small team: unlimited goals, projects, tasks and forms, plus backlog, board, timeline, calendar and summary views. The tradeoffs are explicit. Free gets 2 GB of storage, 100 automation rule runs per month and community support. Atlassian's support documentation also identifies limitations around permissions, roles, audit logs, email notifications, app extensions and advanced cross-team planning.
Those limits explain the business model better than a joke about Jira complexity. Atlassian can be generous with basic work items because the paid surface expands into permissions, external collaboration, storage, support, automation, cross-team planning, data residency and an ecosystem that Atlassian says includes more than 3,000 integrations. Jira starts as a tracker and can become administrative infrastructure for much of a company.
Standard is currently displayed at $7.91 per user per month. It raises storage to 250 GB, adds user roles and permissions, supports external collaboration and offers regional business-hours support. Premium is listed at $14.54 and aims at cross-team planning, approval processes, greater automation, unlimited storage and a 99.9 percent uptime commitment. The free product is a wide front door to a much larger property.
Count the thing that will fill first
A sensible selection exercise can fit on one page. Count active users today and one year from now. Count the issues created in the last 90 days, including closed ones. List every person who needs to comment, approve or only observe. Mark which integrations are essential, which permissions are legally or operationally necessary, and whether two teams can represent the organization without awkward compromises.
Then price the migration. Exporting issues is rarely the hard part. The cost sits in rebuilt automations, rewritten conventions, retrained colleagues, lost links and the moment when two systems disagree about the official status of work. A product that saves $25 a month but creates a rushed migration in a year is not necessarily cheap. A product that costs more but matches the team's likely shape can be the conservative choice.
The three vendors will continue moving these gates. Prices and plan contents change because the market changes, and because AI features are giving software companies new things to meter besides people and storage. The stable lesson is to treat a free plan as an argument about company design. It tells you what the vendor believes should be abundant, what should become scarce and which moment of growth ought to produce an invoice.
Questions teams ask before moving
Does Linear have a free plan?
Yes. Linear currently lists unlimited members, two teams and up to 250 issues on Free, with a 10 MB file-upload limit.
Is Shortcut free for small teams?
Yes. Shortcut says Free is available for teams of up to 10 people and includes its core Kanban, roadmap, report, iteration and docs features.
How many users can use Jira for free?
Up to 10 users. Jira Free also includes 2 GB of storage and community support, with limits on permissions, automation and other administrative features.
Which free plan works beyond 10 people?
Linear is the only product in this roundup advertising unlimited free-plan members. Its tradeoff is a 250-issue total and a two-team limit.
What should we measure before choosing?
Measure active users, issue creation, storage, team structure, permission needs, critical integrations and the likely cost of migrating after a limit is reached.