Plane Pricing Teardown
Quick primer on pricing of Plane.so – OSS Linear/Jira alt
This post is a part of series on commercial open source software pricing. See full list of articles here.
Full disclosure: we use Plane at Beton and are paying customers.
It’s our mid/long-term communication channel with Claude Code.
What is Plane
Open-source project management — Jira/Linear/Monday alternative you can self-host.
Issues, sprints (”cycles”), modules, pages, kanban/gantt/calendar views. React + TypeScript frontend, Django + Python backend.
Raised $4M from OSS Capital and Sherpalo Ventures. Hit #1 in project management on GitHub within a year of launching.
The licensing play
Community Edition is AGPL-3.0. Fully open, no hidden code, zero dependencies on the commercial version.
Two separate codebases — if Plane disappears tomorrow, Community keeps running. No kill switch, no phone-home. That’s rare.
The catch is in the feature gating. Community Edition matches their cloud Free tier, which means you get
projects
work items
cycles
modules
views
pages
estimates
and intake
Sounds complete — until you need integrations.
The Free tier caps at 12 users and gates these behind Pro ($6/seat):
Integrations + Marketplace — the one that got me
Work Item Types and Properties (custom fields)
Workspace Wiki
Time Tracking
Dashboards
Epics and Initiatives
Teamspaces
Business ($13/seat) adds project templates, recurring work items, workflows/approvals, customers, advanced dashboards, and RBAC.
Pricing structure
Per-seat, no surprises. AI credits included per plan (500/1000/2000 per seat).
Free — $0. Core PM. 12 users max. 500 AI credits/seat.
Pro — $6/seat/month. Custom fields, time tracking, dashboards, epics, integrations, wiki. 1000 AI credits/seat.
Business — $13/seat/month. RBAC, templates, workflows, approvals, customers. 2000 AI credits/seat.
Enterprise Grid — quote. Airgapped, LDAP, audit logs, managed deployments.
Self-hosted mirrors the same tiers: Community Edition (= Free), Commercial Edition (= Pro/Business/Enterprise).
Does it make sense to pay?
10-person team on Pro: $720/year. Same team on Linear: $1,200/year. 40% cheaper.
But the real question is Free vs Pro. The free tier is genuinely usable for small teams — no project limits, solid core features.
You’ll hit the wall when you need integrations (we did — connecting Plane to our Claudes required Pro), custom fields, or after 12 users.
At $6/seat seems nice. For a 20-person team, $1,440/year buys you integrations, epics, dashboards, and time tracking.
One engineer-week of building workarounds costs more.
The honest take: Plane’s free tier isn’t crippled — it’s genuinely good for small teams.
But calling integrations a paid feature, imo, is a deliberate growth lever. The moment your workflow needs to connect to anything external, you’re upgrading.
This post is a part of series on commercial open source software pricing. See full list of articles here.