Team segments

Easylim for any team size

6 playbooks for freelancers, small business, startups, enterprise and remote teams.

Deep dive

How to pick the right team scenario — and why a freelancer never needs enterprise PM

5 chapters

Six segments — from a solo freelancer to a 2000-person org — aren't a random split. Each group has <strong>one core problem</strong>: freelancers fight for billable hours, startups fight for speed, small business fights for order, mid-market fights for governance, enterprise fights for security, and remote teams fight for transparency across timezones. Below: how to read your card without browsing all six, how to avoid overpaying for a plan you don't need, and why the single biggest mistake teams make is choosing a tool for the team they <em>will become</em> rather than the team they are today.

01

Розділ

Six segments — find yours in under a minute

Each of the six cards on this hub isn't really about headcount. It's a profile of a team where we keep seeing the same pains and the same solutions. A 50-hour-a-week freelancer and a 500-person enterprise are obvious extremes, but small business and mid-market get mixed up constantly — and that mix-up is what leads to overpaying for the wrong plan.

Here's the 30-second decision: don't count your full headcount, count the number of Easylim seats you actually plan to use in year one. If it's 1 — Freelancer. Up to 15 with stable, simple workflows — Small business. 5-30 and growing fast — Startup (this is about velocity, not legal structure; a 3-year-old company shipping weekly is still a startup). 30-150 with cross-team dependencies — Mid market. 200+ or your security team has asked about SSO — Enterprise. If your team is split across 3+ cities or 4+ timezones — Remote (read this card in addition to your size-based one, not instead).

Most teams enter through one card and move to the next within 12-18 months. Easylim doesn't force a migration — it's the same product across all tiers, just with different recommended workflows and a price change.

  • Count Easylim seats, not company headcount.
  • Startup = velocity, not legal status. Mid-market = structure, not headcount alone.
  • Remote is an add-on card, not a replacement for your size card.
6 audiences · 1 platform

Enterprise

200-2000 seats

SSO · audit log

Startups

5-30 seats

free up to 5

Small business

3-15 seats

$5/seat

Mid market

30-150 seats

roles · perms

Remote

8 timezones

async default

Freelancer

1 user

free forever
02

Розділ

How the need for PM tooling changes from 1 to 2000 people

This is the most important section in the guide — it explains why the same phrase "PM tool" means completely different things at different team sizes, and why the advice you read on Hacker News from a 5-person YC startup is actively harmful for a 200-person scale-up.

1 person. Notes and a calendar are enough. Any PM tool is overkill — until you have 5 active clients. At that point a freelancer using Easylim free pays for itself the first time you don't forget an invoice or a deliverable.

10 people. Slack threads start eating your tasks. You need a Kanban board so nothing falls through. Easylim free covers this with room to spare. Anything you pay for at this size is overspending.

50 people. Now you want dashboards, reminders, custom fields, calendar integration, and a way to see what each team is working on. This is Easylim Team at $5/seat. The mistake here is buying the Business plan "to grow into" — you'll pay 3x for features you won't touch for 18 months.

200 people. Your security team will start asking about SSO (this is not optional once it's asked), you'll need audit logs, role-based permissions, and probably SCIM provisioning. This is the Business plan.

2000+. Enterprise with dedicated support, on-prem option, custom SLA. Pricing is a conversation, not a checkout.

  • Under 10 people — the free plan covers everything.
  • Team at $5/seat is the right answer for 80% of 10-50 person teams.
  • Don't pay for Business or Enterprise until you actually need SSO or audit logs.
company stage → tool maturity
1

Solo

Notes + calendar

10

Startup

Easylim free

50

Growing

Easylim team

200

Scale-up

Easylim business

2k+

Enterprise

Easylim enterprise

one product · 4 tiers · upgrade in place
03

Розділ

Which scenarios actually live in which teams

Every team thinks they use "most of the features". The reality is most teams live inside 1-2 core scenarios and ignore the rest. That's not a bad thing — focused use beats wide-but-shallow use every time.

Freelancers live in daily planning. Everything else is noise. Custom statuses, dashboards, role permissions — turn them off. The tool should disappear after the initial setup.

Startups live in daily planning plus sprint management. OKRs only start to make sense after Series A — before that, OKR theatre wastes more time than it saves. Audit logs aren't relevant — you have 12 people and you all see everything in Slack anyway.

Mid-market is the full stack: planning, sprints, OKRs, cross-team work. Audit logs start showing up in Finance and HR. This is the hardest segment to advise — lots of choices, very few off-the-shelf recipes that survive contact with your specific org chart.

Enterprise uses everything plus formal audit, roles, and policies. Counterintuitively, daily planning becomes less important at this size — it gets delegated down to team leads, and the executive view is dashboards and milestones.

  • Freelancer: 1 scenario, ignore the rest.
  • Startup: 2 scenarios. OKRs only after Series A.
  • Mid-market: hardest segment. Enterprise: most formalised.
use case × team type
FreelanceStartupMidEnterpriseDaily planning
Sprint mgmt
·
OKR / strategy
·
Cross-dept
·
Audit & ctrl
·
·

● core · ◐ used · ○ optional · · skip

04

Розділ

Pricing without regret — how to pick the right tier the first time

The single most expensive mistake in SaaS adoption is buying a bigger plan "to grow into". The logic feels right — "we'll be 50 people in a year, let's just get Business now." Twelve months later you're still 25 people and you've paid for features no one logged in to use.

Free. Up to 5 users. Covers every freelancer and most micro-startups, sometimes up to 7 people if your workflow is simple. The 5-seat cap is real but the rest is honest: unlimited tasks, the same UI, no fake watermarks.

Team — $5/seat. The right answer for 80% of teams. Unlimited projects, custom fields, basic roles. You can grow from 6 to 30 people on this plan without ever noticing a constraint.

Business — $15/seat. Only buy this if: SSO is required by your security team, you need audit logs, or your org chart has 4+ departments with formal access controls. If your CISO hasn't mentioned SSO yet, you don't need Business yet.

Enterprise. Conversation tier. You're here when: 200+ seats, contractual SLA, on-prem deployment, a dedicated solutions engineer. This is a sales motion, not self-serve checkout.

  • Don't pay for Business until security asks about SSO in writing.
  • Team at $5 covers 80% of real-world teams.
  • Enterprise is a contract, not a checkout — budget weeks, not minutes.
pricing by team size

$0/mo

Free

up to 5

2GB · 5 projects

popular

$5/mo

Team

5-30 seats

unlimited projects

$15/mo

Business

30-200 seats

SSO · roles · audit

Custom

Enterprise

200+ seats

SLA · on-prem option

all tiers · same product · upgrade anytimeno card
05

Розділ

When Easylim isn't the right fit — and the typical mistake that costs the most money

Easylim isn't for everyone, and pretending otherwise wastes your time. If you're a heavily regulated enterprise — a FINRA-bound broker-dealer, a government contractor with FedRAMP requirements, a healthcare org needing HIPAA-grade on-prem deployment — Easylim probably isn't the right answer today. This isn't about capability; it's about certifications and deployment model. Look at vendors built for that specific regulatory shape first.

The other anti-pattern is the opposite extreme: a 1-2 person team with a simple to-do list. You don't need Easylim. Apple Notes plus iCal, or a single Notion page, will do the job for zero dollars. Easylim starts making sense once you have 3+ people sharing tasks, because that's when coordination overhead becomes the actual problem.

And the biggest mistake we see weekly: a 30-person company buying Jira or Monday Enterprise "to scale into 300." A year later they're still 30 people, but they're paying $40/seat and have hired an admin to maintain the workflows. See the comparison page for an honest look at where we beat competitors and where we don't. For a 10-30 person team, Easylim Team at $5/seat covers 80% of real work better than an over-configured enterprise PM.

  • Heavy regulation (HIPAA, FedRAMP, gov on-prem) — not us yet.
  • 1-2 person teams — Apple Notes or Notion does the job.
  • Don't buy "to grow into." Upgrade takes two clicks when you actually need it.
don't oversize the tool
Enterprise PM · 10-seat team
  • 6 months of setup
  • $50/seat min
  • Admin overhead
pays for unused power
Right-sized · same team
  • Live in 1 day
  • $0-15/seat
  • No admin team
grows with you

Quick takeaways

  • 1Count Easylim seats, not company headcount, to find your card.
  • 2Free under 5. Team at $5/seat for 5-30. Business only when SSO is required.
  • 31 freelancer = 1 scenario. Mid-market = full stack. Enterprise = formality on top.
  • 4Don't buy an enterprise plan "to grow into." Upgrades take two clicks.
Team segments — Easylim for any size