Set out to record a price rise, found a cut
Four years of Linear's pricing page, lined up on the assumption that SaaS prices go one way. Partway through, it goes down.
The upper plan starts at $12, reaches $14 during 2022, returns to $12 in May 2024, goes back to $14 that December, then $16 in November 2025. Back and forth.
The interesting part is when the cut happened. In May 2024 Linear renamed its plans from Standard / Plus to Basic / Business. It lowered the price with that rename — and, in the same change, added a new ceiling to the free plan.
Follow the price alone and this reads as a price cut.
Three things moved at once
Snapshots from 19 April and 16 May 2024, with the change somewhere between them.
| 2024-04-19 | 2024-05-16 | |
|---|---|---|
| Plan names | Standard / Plus | Basic / Business |
| Upper plan | $14 | $12 |
| Free monthly upload | 150 MB per month | line removed |
| Free team count | not stated | 2 teams |
The lower plan stayed at $8.
The upper plan dropped $2, the free plan's monthly upload cap came off, and in exchange the free plan can now hold two teams. One change loosening in one place and tightening in another.
"2 teams" is a row that did not exist in the earlier comparison table. Read as a price-cut story, a new row does not register.
The price history itself
The upper plan's movement, as far as it can be confirmed. All figures are the annual-billing display.
| When | Upper | Lower |
|---|---|---|
| Early 2022 | $12 | $8 |
| October 2022 | $14 | $8 |
| May 2024 (rename) | $12 | $8 |
| December 2024 | $14 | $8 |
| November 2025 | $16 | $10 |
The lower plan moved once in four years: $8 to $10 in autumn 2025. The upper plan's $14 to $16 falls in the same window.
So the autumn 2025 change was a straightforward rise across both tiers. Different in character from 2024's adjustment through names and conditions.
The free plan has barely moved
This was the surprise.
The 250-issue ceiling, unlimited members, and the 10MB file size cap are unchanged from the first 2022 snapshot to today. Four years, untouched.
The only movement in the free plan is the "2 teams" row appearing and the 150MB monthly cap leaving in exchange.
Plausible, covered elsewhere here, held its price for seventeen months while cutting the near-free tier to a tenth. Linear is the reverse: the price moves and the free plan is left almost alone. Same phrase — "SaaS price rises" — and completely different in where the company chooses to cut.
What could not be established
The limits first.
The two windows in which the repricings happened — 19 April to 16 May 2024, and 8 October to 12 November 2025 — contain no captures at all. That was confirmed against the CDX index, so it is not a retrieval failure; nobody saved those stretches. The change dates are therefore only narrowed to about a month.
Second, every price here is the annual-billing display. Linear's pricing page defaults to annual, and that is the state that gets archived. The monthly figures were never saved. Before December 2024 they could be worked back from a "20% off" line, but that line later disappeared, so after that point they cannot even be estimated.
An attempt to track which plan gains SSO / SAML was dropped: the icon columns in the comparison table could not be read reliably from the archived pages. Better left blank than guessed.
What to read before signing
A change that renames the plans cannot be judged on price. A new name means the definition behind it was rewritten too.
What to read is the difference, and specifically whether the free plan has gained a row. Linear's "2 teams" and Plausible's "One site" both arrived as new rows. An added row does more than a reduced figure.
The more a change looks like a price cut, the more worth reading the conditions.
Sources
Every figure was read from Linear's own pricing page as saved by the Internet Archive — plan names, prices, and the comparison table's small print, directly.
- Pricing page, 19 April 2024 (before the rename, Standard / Plus)
- Pricing page, 16 May 2024 (after the rename, Basic / Business)
- Pricing page, 9 December 2024
- Pricing page, 12 November 2025
- Linear
Only the vendor's own published pricing and plan terms are used. No user reviews or forum posts.