What your team actually pays for GitHub + Linear + Slack + Notion + CI
The real monthly cost of the standard startup dev stack - subscription math for a 10-person team, plus the hidden costs of seams - and an honest look at when consolidation pays.
Apr 7, 2026 · 4 min read · Kash Gohil
The standard startup dev stack - GitHub for code, Linear for planning, Slack for chat, Notion for docs, plus CI and AI add-ons - doesn't feel expensive because each piece is cheap. Add it up per seat, though, and most 10-person teams are paying $40-70 per user per month for tools that don't share a source of truth. Here's the honest math, including the costs that don't show up on invoices.
What does the standard stack cost per month?
List prices as of mid-2026, for a 10-person team on the tiers teams actually use (annual billing where it's cheaper). Check current vendor pricing - these move.
| Tool | Typical tier | ~Per user/mo | 10-person team |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub | Team | $4 | $40 |
| Copilot | Business | $19 | $190 |
| Linear | Business | $14 | $140 |
| Slack | Pro (annual) | $9 | $90 |
| Notion | Business | $15 | $150 |
| CI overage / add-ons | varies | $2-10 | $20-100 |
| Total | ~$63-71 | ~$630-710 |
Quibble with any line - maybe you're on Linear Basic ($8), maybe Notion Plus ($10), maybe no Copilot. Run your own numbers; the lean version of this stack still lands around $40/user/month, and the common version above lands over $60. Annually, that's $7,500-8,500 for a team of ten.
For comparison: Rezee - which covers the code hosting, planning, chat, docs, CI, and agent surface of that whole table - is $10/user/month on Startup and $20 on Business (pricing). Same ten people: $1,200-2,400 a year. But hold that thought, because the subscription line isn't the real story.
What are you paying that isn't on an invoice?
The integration tax. Linear↔GitHub, Slack↔everything, Notion↔nothing-really. Someone configures these, someone re-fixes them when a vendor changes an API, and someone answers "why did the sync stop?" That someone is an engineer, and their hour costs more than any seat.
The context-switching tax. Five tools means the answer to "what's the state of this work?" is assembled by a human, several times a day, from five tabs. Attention-research (Gloria Mark's work at UC Irvine is the standard citation) puts refocus time after an interruption at over twenty minutes; tool-hopping is that interruption, industrialized. Even at one hour lost per person per day, a 10-person team at startup salaries burns far more in switching than in subscriptions - an order of magnitude more.
The truth-drift tax. The spec says X, the tracker says Y, the code does Z. Reconciling them is standups, status docs, and "quick syncs" - meetings that exist because the tools can't agree. This one's unmeasurable and everyone knows it's the biggest.
What's the honest counterargument?
Consolidation isn't free either, so here's the other side:
- Free tiers are real. Two founders on GitHub Free + Linear Free + Slack's free tier pay ~$0. Below roughly five people, the standard stack is hard to beat on price alone - the seams cost you, but the invoices don't.
- Migration costs once. Moving repos is trivial (
git push), but translating CI workflows, importing issues, and retraining habits is a real week or two. Consolidation pays back monthly; it charges up front. - Best-of-breed polish is real. Linear is more polished than any all-in-one's planning layer, ours included. You're trading per-tool polish for shared context - we think that trade wins, but it is a trade, as we lay out in Rezee vs Linear + GitHub.
- Some pieces may be non-negotiable. Slack Connect with customers, company-wide Notion, open source on GitHub. A partial consolidation - engineering's lifecycle in one workspace, company tools staying put - is a legitimate landing, and common; see Rezee vs Notion + Slack.
So when does consolidation pay?
A simple rule of thumb from the math above:
- Under ~5 people: free tiers win on cash. Consolidate only if the seams already hurt.
- 5-50 people: the sweet spot. You're paying $40-70/user for fragmented context; one workspace at $10-20 cuts spend by two-thirds and removes the seams the other taxes flow from. This is the team Rezee is built for.
- 50+ people: subscription savings still land, but switching costs, compliance requirements, and entrenched process dominate the decision - evaluate like the enterprise choice it is, starting from our comparison guide.
FAQ
How much does the average startup spend on developer tools?
For the standard stack (GitHub, Linear, Slack, Notion, CI, and AI assistance), typical spend is $40-70 per developer per month on paid tiers - $5,000-8,500 a year for a team of ten - before counting the engineering time spent maintaining integrations between them.
Is an all-in-one platform actually cheaper?
On subscriptions, usually by 50-70% for teams past free tiers: one $10-20 seat replaces four or five smaller ones. The larger saving is operational - no integration maintenance and less status-reconciliation overhead - but if you're comparing honestly, remember migration is a real one-time cost and free tiers keep tiny teams cheap.
What's the cheapest way to run a dev stack for a small team?
Under five people: free tiers of the standard stack, genuinely. Past that, either prune tools you underuse (does a five-person team need Notion Business and Confluence-grade wikis?) or consolidate into one workspace - the per-seat math above is the fork in the road.
Does the context-switching cost argument actually hold?
The research on interruption cost is solid (Mark et al., UC Irvine - refocus takes 20+ minutes); applying it to tool-switching involves honest extrapolation. Our claim is directional, not precise: even heavily discounted, attention costs dwarf subscription costs, which is why "cheaper tools" is the weakest reason to consolidate and "shared context" is the strongest.