Welcome back to Good Better Best.
Each week, we break down real pricing, packaging, and product moves from SaaS and AI leaders and share the ideas worth stealing.
This week, we're digging into Linear. Over the past 6 months, they've expanded their product and evolved their monetization model, showing how to drive expansion when seats growth is flat. We're going to break down how their new model allows for tier-to-tier upgrades and in-tier expansion. Let's get to it.
PS. For all the pricing leaders out there, Procore is hiring a Senior Director of Pricing and Monetization, who will report to the VP of Corporate Strategy. If you’re interested, check out the link or shoot me an email at [email protected].
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This Week in Pulse
This week we observed 100+ changes. The highlights:
GitLab launched Flex Commitment, blending seats and credits. See the diff →
Linear introduced Coding Sessions and a new credit model. See the diff →
Anthropic added Fable and Claude Design across plans. See the diff →
OpenRouter rebranded enterprise discounts. See the diff →
LangChain unlocked unlimited Fleet agents. See the diff →
Datadog launched Disaster Recovery. See the diff →
Canva limited Leonardo.AI features in Business trials. See the diff →
Fireflies cut free storage 50% and shifted to per-team billing. See the diff →
15Five added Focus Briefs and AMAYA AI agents to Perform. See the diff →
Attio added SCIM provisioning to Enterprise. See the diff →
Aloware added an AI conversation query tool to xPro. See the diff →
OpusClip doubled brand templates in Pro. See the diff →
Cake Equity launched a free plan for pre-team founders. See the diff →
Check out more updates on PricingSaaS →
PricingSaaS Pulse Intelligence
Here's what people were researching in Pulse this week:
AI credits and credit-based pricing models
Willingness-to-pay research methods
Tiering and packaging structure: good-better-best, anchoring/decoy
AI monetization and packaging: bundle vs add-on
Usage-based and committed-spend contracts
Note: AI credits is the loudest theme this week and Monday.com is the #2 most-looked-up company - the live question people are bringing to Pulse is how to price AI credit buckets and overages.
How Linear Evolved its Seat-Based Model
Seat-based models are under pressure. Teams are staying lean — hiring less, doing more with AI — and when headcount stops climbing, so does the revenue from new seats. In short, you have to find expansion elsewhere. With a single product, there are two primary ways to do that using pricing and packaging.
The first is driving plan-to-plan upgrades: giving customers clear reasons to move up a tier, which takes thoughtful packaging.
The second is in-tier expansion: getting customers to spend more inside the plan they're already on, which almost always means adding a usage component.
Over the last six months, Linear has done both. Today, we’re breaking down what they did on each axis, and what other seat-based companies can take from it.
Axis 1: Engineering plan-to-plan upgrades
Most of Linear's recent moves support upgrade expansion. They’ve done this in two main ways: offering new features, and adding new usage limits.
Linear added Guided Reviews, Releases, and several other new features, as well as a new usage metric, Pipelines, for the Releases feature.
On the product front, Linear launched a bunch of new features, including:
Releases, Which lets teams plan and track software releases inside Linear, tied to their CI/CD pipeline, so issues update automatically as code ships and you can see what's live versus merged.
Sub-Teams, allowing customers to manage work across separate teams with their own workflows, statuses, and labels.
Linear Asks, Linear's intake tool, turns requests into tracked Linear issues, so support, ops, and other teams can file work without living in the app. Two changes landed here.
Web Forms, which let people outside the company submit requests through a public form.
Triage, which is where those incoming requests get sorted and assigned, added two new features: Diffs and Guided reviews.
Coding Sessions, lets Linear Agent write code and create pull requests.
Each of these feature updates comes with its own expansion levers.
Releases is gated to Business and Enterprise plans, and has its own usage metric, Pipelines. Business gets 15 pipelines (up from 5 at launch, suggesting customers are actually using it), and Enterprise gets unlimited.
Sub-teams is also gated to Business and Enterprise plans, with Business customers getting sub-teams that are 1-level deep, and Enterprise getting up to 5 levels deep.
Within Linear Asks, Diffs are available across all plans, Guided Reviews are gated to Business and Enterprise plans, and Web Forms are an Enterprise-only feature.
Coding Sessions is in beta now, but is available to all paying customers, and runs on AI credits, Linear’s first push into usage-based pricing.
Put it together and the upgrade paths are clearer than they were six months ago. Linear is maturing from an issue tracker into a full product development system, or as Lenny Rachitsky put it: "Linear is eating the world." The added functionality gives teams more reasons to move from Basic to Business, and the thresholds on Sub-Teams and Releases tells a clearer Enterprise story.
The most exciting move is Coding Sessions, which opens up in-plan expansion through Linear’s new credit model.
Axis 2: Driving in-plan Expansion
On June 11, Linear launched Coding Sessions. Assign an issue to the Linear Agent and it pulls in context, writes the code in the cloud using Claude Code or Codex, and hands back a diff ready for review, all without leaving Linear. Linear says it already uses this internally to resolve about 30% of incoming bugs on the first pass, turning triage straight into fixes (a future possibility for outcome-based pricing?).
For pricing, this is the biggest shift: it's the first thing Linear has ever charged for outside of a seat. Coding Sessions run on AI credits — a usage-based meter that sits alongside the subscription and, crucially, has nothing to do with seat count. Coding Sessions details include:
A prepaid wallet. Usage draws from a prepaid dollar balance held at the workspace level, pooled across the team, shown in real dollars, and fully opt-in.
A starter budget to get you going. Paid plans get $20 in promotional credits per seat, activated when you connect GitHub code access. It's a free wallet designed to drive adoption before actually spending.
Metered by the task. Billing is per session, based on model tokens and sandbox compute. A typical bug fix runs about $5 to $7; longer sessions vary more. Top-ups land on a separate invoice from your subscription.
Generally, product feedback has been positive, though there’s been mixed feedback on pricing. Some commenters complained about not being able to BYO subscriptions from Claude and Codex, but Linear CEO Karri Saarinen pushed back that this isn't Linear's call — the model labs don't let you point an existing subscription at a cloud agent. On the other side, the prepaid model earned real praise for transparency, and a clear breakdown of what it costs.
Why this matters
Take these moves together, and Linear is using a combination of product, packaging, and pricing to ensure they have plenty of expansion opportunities beyond the seat.
The timing matters: seat-based revenue gets less reliable every quarter as teams do more with fewer people. Adding a usage axis now, while sharpening the upgrade ladder, is how you keep expanding accounts when seat counts flatten.
Linear has always been known for crisp design and a simple pricing page, and impressively, the pricing page looks as clean as ever. This is also only the beginning, as Linear's own docs promising more features on usage-based billing.
Diffs sourced and validated via PricingSaaS. First-party confirmation from Linear's Coding Sessions changelog and usage-based billing docs.
Thanks for reading! If you’re working on AI monetization and want to learn more about how we help, book time here.
Until next time,
Rob