How many licenses to buy for a small team using local-first task software

Someone on the team found a task app they like, and now finance wants a number. How many seats? For most local-first apps the honest answer is that the question comes from the wrong world. Trayzero needs zero licenses. It's free and open source under GPLv3, so five people install it five times and the invoice is never raised.

That answer is short enough to feel like a dodge, so here's the full version: what each option actually charges a team, what "free" covers, and the real cost you take on when the data never leaves anyone's phone.

The short answer, by tool

Tool	What you buy	Licenses for a 5-person team
Trayzero	Nothing. Free, GPLv3	0
OmniFocus	One seat per person	5 seats
Things	One purchase per Apple platform, per person	5 to 15 purchases
Todoist Business	Per user, per month	5 users, forever

Trayzero is the outlier for one structural reason. There's no server to pay for, no accounts to provision, and no billing system to attach a seat count to. The source is public on GitHub under GPLv3, which grants anyone the right to run and share it. A license count needs something to count, and here there isn't one.

What "local-first" does to the word license

Cloud task managers charge per seat because a seat is real to them. It's a row in their user table, storage on their disk, and sync traffic they pay for. Cut the server out and all of that disappears with it.

Trayzero keeps every task in a SQLite database inside the app's private storage on the phone. Nothing leaves the device. There's no Trayzero account, no cloud sync, and no analytics SDK, so the company running the app has no per-user cost to recover from you.

The app is free on Google Play, the App Store, and F-Droid, and every feature is unlocked. There's an optional tip jar and a cheap Supporter subscription, but those buy cosmetic extras like a supporter badge. No part of the GTD workflow sits behind them, which means nobody on the team ends up on a different tier from anyone else.

One caveat worth stating early, because it decides the whole question for some teams: Trayzero runs on Android and iOS only. There's no desktop build. If your team works from a keyboard all day, that alone may rule it out, and the keyboard-driven desktop options are a better place to start.

What the paid tools actually charge

OmniFocus is the clearest per-seat model of the three. Omni Group's own documentation says each team member using the app on their own machine needs their own seat purchase, so a five-person team buys five. Seats are managed as a quantity on the subscription, and there's a perpetual license path as well if you prefer buying once over renewing. Two details matter for planning: seats added mid-term are charged a prorated amount for the days left in the current period, and seats you remove take effect at the next renewal rather than refunding immediately. Omni Group doesn't publish a volume discount tier, so plan on full price per person.

Things doesn't have a team concept at all. It's sold as separate apps for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro, priced in US dollars and converted by Apple for each App Store region. That means the count tracks devices rather than people. A designer who wants it on a Mac and an iPhone is two purchases, not one, and a five-person team on two devices each is ten. Nothing is transferable between people either, because each purchase lands in an individual Apple account.

Todoist is the subscription baseline. The Beginner tier is free, Pro is per user per month, and Business is the team plan, also billed per user per month. You get shared projects, assignment, and admin controls for that. You also never stop paying, which is the trade covered in more detail in subscription vs one-time payment.

Free isn't the same as no cost

Here's where the local-first pitch gets honest. Trayzero has no license fee, and it also has no shared lists, no task assignment, no team dashboard, and no admin console. Every inbox is private to the phone it lives on. That isn't a missing feature waiting for a roadmap slot, it's what happens when you commit to keeping the data on the device.

So the money you don't spend on seats gets spent somewhere else: on process. A team using Trayzero has to decide, deliberately, where the shared truth lives. Most small teams already have somewhere. A ticket tracker, a shared doc, a channel. Trayzero holds each person's private next actions off that spine, which is closer to how GTD was designed anyway. The method is about individual commitments, not group ones.

The teams this suits are the ones where members work mostly independently and coordinate at known checkpoints. The teams it doesn't suit are the ones that need to see each other's task states in real time. If that's you, buy the seats. A per-seat bill is cheaper than pretending a coordination gap doesn't exist.

Offboarding is a data question, not a seat question

The seat side of offboarding is trivial with a free tool. There's no license to reclaim, deactivate, or reassign, because there was never one issued. Compare that to a per-seat subscription, where you have to remember to drop the seat and then wait for the next renewal date before the charge actually stops.

The data side is the one that bites, and it cuts against the local-first model. When someone leaves a team using a cloud tool, an admin logs in and the work is still there. When someone leaves a team using Trayzero, their task database went out the door in their pocket. There's no Trayzero server holding a copy, no admin console, and no remote wipe. That's the same property that makes the privacy claim true.

The mitigation is the JSON export, and it only works if you plan for it. Trayzero exports the whole database as a plain readable JSON file that can be handed over, imported by whoever picks up the work, and read years later without the app. Put it in the offboarding checklist next to returning the laptop. The same file covers the more likely failure, a lost or bricked phone, which with no cloud behind it means the tasks are simply gone unless someone exported them.

This is the honest shape of the trade. You skip the invoice and the admin console, and in exchange you own the backup discipline yourself.

What a five-person rollout looks like

No procurement, no seat allocation, no license keys to distribute. The setup is short:

1. Everyone installs it themselves. Google Play, the App Store, or F-Droid if your team avoids Google services. No admin has to provision anything, and there's no onboarding email with a code in it.
2. Agree on where shared work lives. Pick the one place team commitments are tracked, and write down that Trayzero is for personal next actions only. Skipping this step is how teams end up with five private systems and no shared view.
3. Set a review rhythm. GTD's weekly review is a solo habit, but doing it on the same day means everyone arrives at the team checkpoint with a current list instead of a stale one.
4. Decide your backup policy. Trayzero exports the whole database as a plain JSON file you can put anywhere: a backup drive, your own encrypted storage, another phone. With no cloud, nobody is backing this up for you. Say out loud whose job it is.
5. Let security read the source if they want to. GPLv3 and a public repo mean a review can verify the on-device claim instead of accepting a vendor questionnaire. That's a real advantage in regulated shops, and it costs the team nothing to offer.

When to buy seats instead

Be blunt with yourself about the requirements. Buy a per-seat tool if you need shared task lists, assignment and accountability across people, centralized billing and admin control, or a desktop client. Those are legitimate needs and no amount of local-first philosophy substitutes for them.

Choose the zero-license path if the team is small, works independently, cares about where the data physically sits, and already coordinates somewhere else. The combination is more common than the seat-based vendors let on. Plenty of five-person teams don't need a shared task database. They need five people who each know what they're doing next.

If you're still weighing the two architectures rather than the price tags, the local-first vs cloud comparison covers the data-ownership side, and the GTD app evaluation checklist covers what to test before you commit a whole team to anything.