Pricing
We don’t charge per person, and we never will. Bring as many people as you like on either plan.
CoLabEx is in early access. Prices are in US dollars.
Free
$0 — forever, not a trial
Freelancers, a team working together, a class, or a company getting started.
- Any number of people. No seats to buy, no per-person fee, ever.
- Everything in the project-management side: tasks, subtasks, milestones, deliverables, sprints, the board, timeline, calendar and workload views.
- Portfolio roll-up across projects, workload and capacity, and time tracking — all three are behind the first paid tier at Asana and ClickUp.
- Client and guest links, approvals, documents, a whiteboard, automations and workflows.
- The whole Education Center, skill tracks, placement tests and classes.
- AI features and an MCP server for your own assistant, both with fair-use limits (below).
Limits
- 3 projects per company. Everything else is unlimited.
- Shared daily limits on AI features across the platform, so one heavy user can't exhaust it for everyone.
Company
$15/month — flat, for the whole company
A company running more than a few projects at once.
- Unlimited projects.
- Everything in Free, which is everything — nothing is held back for a higher tier.
- Still any number of people, at the same flat price.
- Cancel any time; you keep every project and go back to the free allowance.
Limits
- The same fair-use AI limits as the free plan. We'd rather tell you the number than meter you by surprise.
What everyone else costs to start
These are the real figures a company pays to begin, taken from each vendor’s own pricing page on 10 October 2026. Several of them won’t sell you fewer than three or five seats, so the advertised per-user price isn’t the price — which is the whole reason this table exists.
| Tool | Costs to start | Why |
|---|---|---|
| CoLabEx | $0, then $15/mo | Flat for the whole company, any number of people, no seat minimum. |
| monday.com (Basic) | $27/month | $9/user billed annually, and it won't sell you fewer than 3 seats. |
| Smartsheet (Business) | $57/month | $19/user annually, 3 members minimum. No free plan at all now — 30-day trial only. |
| Wrike (Business) | $125/month | $25/user annually, 5 seats minimum, and no monthly billing option above their entry tier. |
| Teamwork (Accelerate) | $125/month | $24.99/user annually, 5 seats minimum. |
| Jira (Standard) | $75/month | Billed as a flat $900/year band for 1–10 users — which works out at $25/user for a team of three. |
| Basecamp (Studio) | $59/month | Flat for unlimited users, like ours — 10 projects. |
| Basecamp (Freelancer) | $25/month | Flat, but capped at 3 projects and 5 users. |
| Asana (Starter) | $13.49/month | Per user, monthly. Their free plan stops at 2 users, so a team of five starts at $67/month. |
Prices change without telling us. If one of these is out of date, we’d rather know — the workings are published in our own notes.
Where we’re not the cheapest
If you’re one person, or two, there are cheaper paid plans than ours. Freedcamp starts at $1.49 per user a month, Plaky at $3.99, Zoho Projects at $4.00. A flat $15 can never beat $1.49 for a single seat, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.
What we’d say instead: at that size you don’t need our paid plan at all — the free one has every feature and no cap on people. That’s the part worth comparing, because monday.com’s free plan stops at 2 seats and Asana’s at 2 users, so a team of five can’t use either of them for free at any size.
Questions people actually ask
Do freelancers pay? No, and that isn’t a promotion. Freelancers are the people doing the work, and CoLabEx already takes a 5% cut of a project that carries real compensation. Charging a subscription on top would be charging twice.
What happens if I cancel? You keep every project, and the free allowance of 3 applies again. Nothing is deleted and nothing is held hostage.
What are the AI limits? 15 AI actions per person per day, and 200 across the whole platform, shared. We publish the numbers rather than calling it “fair use”, and connecting your own AI assistant over MCP is free and unmetered on both plans. For contrast, Asana allows 5 AI requests per user per month on its paid plans and charges $0.50 each after that.
Is there a free trial? There’s no trial because there’s a free plan, and it isn’t a stripped-down one — it’s the whole product with a project allowance.