There’s a particular kind of frustration that every engineering manager knows well: The team is efficient everything is smooth sailing. Then someone from procurement forwards you a license renewal invoice, and suddenly you’re doing mental gymnastics about whether that new employee really needs access to the tool.
At Modelithe, we think that’s a terrible way to run a software business. So we don’t do it.
License Costs Shouldn’t Be a Scaling Decision
Per-seat pricing puts a silent tax on growth. Teams start making access decisions based on budget rather than workflow.
Our core belief is simple:
A pricing model that lets teams scale without worrying about ballooning license costs is a better pricing model.
Full stop.
So whether your team is 5 people, 10, or even 30 to 50 or 150 — the price doesn’t change because the headcount does. If your organization can genuinely coordinate 50 people as a single cohesive team, honestly, that’s impressive. Go for it. Modelithe won’t penalize you for pulling it off.
We believe in honest constraints
In practice, there’s a natural ceiling where a single-team model starts to buckle under its own weight. Once you’re pushing past roughly 10 people, the coordination overhead grows faster than the output does. This isn’t controversial; it’s why Scrum recommends keeping teams small, and why Conway’s Law is still cited in architecture reviews decades after it was written.
The Founder’s Edition – unlimited users for your team
Scum suggested a development team size typically 3-6 people in the very first paper on Scrum, later modified to “seven people, plus or minus two” developers, and now the Scrum Guide states a Scrum team to be “typically 10 or fewer people” including Scrum Master and Product Owner.
A team of 10+ people running 4-week iterations will produce an iteration backlog that’s genuinely difficult to navigate. The sheer volume of decently sized Tasks won’t fit on a single monitor, and the information we need – “are we still on track” – is camouflaged.
This is where we think the honest conversation starts.
The Accelerator Edition: Built for Multi-Team Reality
When a single team stops being the right unit of organization, Modelithe’s Accelerator Edition is designed to meet you there – but not before.
The first pain point in a growing company is the point when the team’s size exceed what is manageable for a single manager.
Although creative use of Epics and Labels allows cumbersome workaround in the Founder’s edition, we have first-hand experience of someone (not us) tried to save a couple of hundred Euros in license costs for a client. The client eventually had to bring us in to solve the mess, which unfortunately cost them thousands more.
The Modelithe Accelerator Edition unlocks the ability to run multiple teams with inter-team dependencies, coordinated through a unit called the WorkPackage. It it deliberately scoped:
A WorkPackage represents the largest unit of delivery that a single team can test in isolation.
That constraint isn’t accidental; it forces a level of decomposition that keeps dependencies visible and manageable rather than implicit and chaotic.
With multiple teams tracking their own WorkPackage, you get cross-team progress visibility without collapsing everything into one unmanageable backlog.
The Modelithe Model in Plain Language
| Your situation | Our suggestion |
|---|---|
| Single team, likely less than ~15 people | Founder’s edition — scale freely, unlimited seats |
| Team growing beyond ~10 people, or running multiple teams | Accelerator Edition — WorkPackages + Epic Iteration View + a some other things that wasn’t needed before. |
| Genuinely running 30–50 people as one team | Respect. But you probably overuse labels or drown in Epics. And please, check that your manager really disconnect during the vacation periods. |
Per-seat models only align vendor incentives with headcount growth. That sounds fine until you realize it means the vendor’s interests diverge from yours the moment you need to bring more people in. Some vendors even increase the per-seat cost as the number of seats grow. That’s not far play. In fact, that makes the vendor want you to work more – not produce more.
The philosophy of Modelithe is not built on units of work – the Modelithe method focus on achieving the goal and the outcome of tasks,
Thus, our business model of course align our incentives with your success – shipping software, coordinating teams effectively, and scaling without bureaucratic drag. That’s the bet behind Modelithe’s pricing, and it’s one we’re happy to stand behind.
Interested in seeing how Modelithe handles scaling team coordination? Visit modelithe.com to learn more.