Nobody buys a toolchain. It accretes. A board here, a whiteboard there, a standup bot because the calendar got loud, docs because the board can’t hold a decision. Then one day someone opens the billing page and the “cheap” stack is a car payment.
Ron Swanson solves the toolchain problem.
We ran this math for a typical five-person dev team, using current list prices, because we had a dog in the fight and wanted to know if the dog was right. Disclosure: we build Kahoona. The competitor numbers below are their public prices; check them before quoting us.
The accreted stack
A realistic small-team setup, one tool per job:
Project tracking: Jira Standard or Linear. ~$8–9 per seat. → ~$40–45/mo
Whiteboard: Miro or FigJam seats for the people who sketch. ~$8–10 per seat; even half the team sketching is real money. → ~$20–50/mo
Docs/wiki: Notion Plus, because the free tier caps the team. ~$10–12 per seat. → ~$50–60/mo
Standup/async bot: Geekbot or similar. ~$2.50–3 per seat. Small, but nonzero. → ~$13–15/mo
PR dashboard / release visibility: usually free tier or rolled into something else. → ~$0–15/mo
Total: roughly $125–185 per month for five people — call it $150 as the midpoint, or $1,800 a year. Per seat, that’s $25–37/month before anyone has bought a monitor.
The hidden line item
The invoice isn’t the whole cost. Four tools means four sources of truth, and somebody reconciles them: the ticket that didn’t reflect the sketch, the doc that contradicted the board. Call it half an hour per person per week of translation and archaeology. At any sane loaded rate for a developer, that’s another $300–500/month of payroll doing integration work by hand. This number never appears on a billing page, which is exactly why it’s worth writing down.
The $5-seat alternative
Kahoona puts the whiteboard, the project board, and live GitHub activity in one workspace. Commits, PRs, and CI stream in beside the tasks; the board builds itself from your repo in about 30 seconds. Pricing: free to start, $5 per seat after.
Same five-person team: $25/month. $300 a year.
Against the $150 midpoint stack, that’s about $1,500 a year back — and against the loaded cost including reconciliation time, the honest number is several times that.
Where the cheap tool costs you
We’d be hypocrites to stop at the flattering math. The consolidated workspace is younger than Jira, thinner than Notion as a wiki, and a worse whiteboard than Miro for facilitated workshops. If your team runs heavy client workshops, or needs enterprise compliance, or has a decade of Jira muscle memory, the accreted stack may be the correct price for the correct tools.
The calculation that usually decides it for a small dev team: are you paying for four best-in-class tools, or are you paying for the seams between them? Most five-person teams are doing the second.
Do your own math
List what your team paid last month for tracking, whiteboarding, docs, and async check-ins. Add half an hour per person per week at your loaded rate. Compare that number, not the sticker prices, to whatever consolidated option you’re evaluating — ours or anyone’s. Tooling decisions made on sticker price are how teams end up with a $1,800/year stack held together by manual labor.
👉 One workspace, $5 a seat, free to start — kahoona.app
Related: The $5-Seat Dev Workspace · Kahoona vs Jira: An Honest Comparison