AI coding agent cost for a 10-person startup, in real numbers

An AI coding agent for a startup costs two things, and the pricing pages only show you one. There is the seat, or the plan, or the credit pack, which is the number on the page. And there is the model bill, which is what the agent spends reading your repository and writing code, and which on most tools is either bundled into a unit you cannot inspect or billed by the vendor at a rate they set. For a ten-person team the second number is usually larger than the first, and whether you already pay for Claude or ChatGPT can change it by a factor of five. This post does the whole-number math for a small team across the tools a startup actually shortlists, with every assumption written down so you can swap in your own.

Prices checked in early September 2026 against each vendor's own pages, which are linked. The token estimates are ours and are labeled as such.

Sinatra is our product. It is in the examples, the assumptions are the same for every tool, and the one where we come out worst is left in.

The team, and the assumptions

Ten engineers. Four of them hand tickets to an agent; the other six review pull requests, write code in an editor, and never trigger a run. Between them, the four delegate about forty tasks a month, two a day on a working week.

Each task is a real ticket on a real repository, so the agent reads a lot and writes a little. Our estimate, and it is only that: about 1.5 million input tokens and 100,000 output tokens per task on a frontier model. At Anthropic's list rates for a mid-tier model, that is roughly $10 a task and $400 a month in tokens, before prompt caching brings it down. If your repository is small and your tickets are tight, halve it; if you point the agent at a monorepo with a slow install, double it. The point of the exercise is the shape of the bill, not the third decimal.

One more thing to hold onto. On several of these tools the seat is only owed for people who use the agent, so the ten-person team is often a four-seat bill.

GitHub Copilot coding agent

Copilot Business is $19 a seat a month, and since June 2026 each seat includes 1,900 AI credits a month, which at a cent each is $19 of model usage at GitHub's published per-token rates. Those rates matched Anthropic's list prices row for row when we checked. The agent also runs in a GitHub Actions environment, so its sessions consume Actions minutes.

Four seats is $76, and it includes $76 of credits. Forty tasks at our estimate is $400 of tokens, so about $324 of that is billed as additional usage on top. Call it $400 a month plus Actions minutes for the four-seat case, or $514 if all ten engineers hold a Copilot seat for the editor anyway, in which case the agent's seat cost is already sunk and only the overage is new.

What does not help: the Claude Max or ChatGPT plan on anyone's card. Copilot's bring-your-own-key covers editors and the CLI, not the cloud agent, so every token goes through GitHub's billing.

Cursor Cloud Agents

Cursor Teams is $40 a user a month on the standard seat, and Cloud Agents are charged at the model's API price from a usage pool. Cursor's pricing docs estimate that daily agent users typically spend $60 to $100 a month in total usage, and on Teams there is a Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per million tokens on top of the API price, including on tokens bought with your own key.

Four seats is $160. Forty tasks at API price is about $400, and the token rate on 64 million tokens adds about $16. So roughly $576 a month if only the four delegators are on Cursor, and about $416 of new spend if all ten already pay for Cursor as their editor. That editor is the reason a lot of startups will land here regardless of the arithmetic, and it is a good reason.

Subscriptions do not count. Cursor's usage pool cannot draw on a Claude or ChatGPT plan.

Devin

Devin Teams is $80 a month plus $40 per full seat, so four seats is $240 before any usage. Per Cognition's self-serve billing page, Pro and Teams seats come with a daily and weekly allowance, and usage past it draws on on-demand credits. The size of the allowance is not published.

That makes this the one example we cannot finish. $240 is the floor. Whether forty tasks fit inside the allowance, and what the overage costs when they do not, is something you learn by running them. No key path is documented, so a subscription does not change the number.

Linear coding sessions

If the team already uses Linear on Basic or Business, the agent has no seat cost at all. Sessions draw on a prepaid balance at model tokens at provider-published rates with no markup, plus $0.25 per 20-minute block of sandbox. At our estimate, forty sessions of about forty minutes each is $400 of tokens and $20 of sandbox time, so about $420 a month, and you can work that out before you run anything, which is rare.

Subscriptions do not count here either; the balance does the paying. And there is no GitHub-issue trigger, which matters for a startup with repositories whose issues never moved into Linear. We went through the whole thing in Linear coding sessions, explained.

Sinatra

Sinatra is $20 per workspace member, including owners, admins, and members who only review. If only the four delegators join the Sinatra workspace and the other six review in GitHub without joining, four seats is $80. If all ten join Sinatra, seats cost $200. The examples below assume four Sinatra memberships; task activity does not determine the seat count.

The model bill depends on what the four connect. On an Anthropic or OpenRouter key, the tokens are on your provider's invoice at their rate, so the same forty tasks cost about $400 and the month is about $480. That is the same band as Copilot and Cursor, because at API rates tokens dominate everything and nobody on this page is marking them up by much.

The number changes when the four already pay for Claude or ChatGPT. Each member can connect their own subscription, tasks they start run on it, and the workspace needs no shared key. The marginal cost of a task is then whatever the subscription already costs, inside its own limits, and the month is $80. That is the whole cost: the subscriptions you already pay for, plus $20 a member for orchestration.

Neither number is free of fine print. A subscription has rate limits of its own, and forty tasks a month on one Claude or ChatGPT plan spends allowance that plan's owner might have wanted for their editor. And leaving the credential unset on a paid workspace runs on our keys at the provider's exact rate from a prepaid balance, which is the $480 case again with one fewer account to manage.

The startup program

For teams under about a hundred people, the seat is half price for a year. The startup program takes 50% off the $20 seat for 12 months, so $10 a member. Four seats is $40 a month, and the model side is unchanged: your provider bills you directly at their rates, or your subscriptions cover it, and the discount is on the Sinatra seat only. You apply with a company URL and a team size, a person reads it, and if it fits you get a single-use code to enter at checkout. Checkout still collects a card, billing stays month to month, and at month 13 the seat returns to $20.

There is no funding stage to prove and no investor list. The bucket above 100 is on the form on purpose, because we would rather read the application than turn a team away at the door.

The table

Tool	Seats under the four-seat assumption	Model bill at API rates	With Claude or ChatGPT subscriptions	Month, four seats
Copilot coding agent	$76	$400, of which $76 is included	No change; subscriptions do not apply	About $400 plus Actions minutes
Cursor Cloud Agents	$160	$400 plus $16 token rate	No change	About $576
Devin Teams	$240	Inside an unpublished allowance, then credits	No change	$240 floor, rest unknown
Linear coding sessions	$0 on an existing Linear plan	$400 plus $20 sandbox	No change	About $420
Sinatra	$80 ($40 on the startup program)	$400 on your own key	$0	$480, or $80 on subscriptions, or $40 on subscriptions with the program

Read the table as a shape rather than a ranking. At API rates everyone lands between $400 and $600, and the choice is about triggers, editors, and who you want to hold the model relationship. The gap opens only when the people delegating already have subscriptions, and then it is $80 against $400 and up.

What to watch as the team grows

Usage grows faster than headcount. The four delegators become eight, the two tasks a day become five, and anything metered per token or per credit grows with it. A flat seat does not, and a percentage fee does most of all; Augment's published 40% on model usage is the extreme case, and we covered it in the pricing roundup.

Units hide the growth. A credit, an ACU, or a plan tier tells you that you ran out; a provider invoice tells you why. Prefer the tool that lets you see the token bill even if you decide to let the vendor pay it.

And the rollout path matters at ten people because it will matter more at forty. On Sinatra, one GitHub organization is one workspace, invited members bring their own subscription or use the workspace key, and each repository can carry a committed .sinatrarc for its model, test command, and phases. The BYOK post covers what holding the key yourself asks of you.

Common questions

What is the cheapest AI coding agent for a small team?

If the team already pays for Claude or ChatGPT, an agent that runs on those subscriptions with a flat seat, which today means Codex cloud for ChatGPT plans, Claude Code's GitHub Action for Claude plans, or Sinatra for either from a Linear ticket or a labeled GitHub issue. If nobody has a subscription, the four tools above all land in the same band at API rates and the decision is about workflow. For one person, Jules is free for 15 tasks a day.

Do I pay for every engineer or only the ones who use it?

It depends on the tool. Sinatra bills every workspace membership, whether or not the member starts a task. Unaccepted invitations do not count; accepted members who only review do. Copilot and Cursor bill granted seats, though an engineer with a seat for the editor already has the agent. Devin bills full seats plus a team fee. Linear charges no agent seat beyond the tracker plan.

How does the Sinatra startup discount work?

Apply at the startup page with a company URL and team size. A person reviews it, and approved teams get a single-use code that takes 50% off every seat for 12 months at checkout. A card is still collected, the model bill still goes to your provider, and the seat returns to $20 at month 13.

Does the free tier work for a team?

For an evaluation, yes: 5 tasks a day with your own API key or subscription, with no card. Forty tasks a month fits inside it. It stops fitting when the team wants more than five in a day, which is the point of the paid seat.

If you want to run the forty tasks before deciding, start free with the subscriptions your team already has, and apply to the startup program when the free tier stops being enough.