First thought: you've priced it quite ambitiously. A 10 user team would be $90/month, compared to $20 for JIRA + JIRA Agile, $42 for Asana premium, $50 for Trello business (or free for normal trello), $35 for Pivotal Tracker, ...
(Which isn't to say it necessarily should be cheaper, only that it seems surprising to see that price without any attempt to compare or justify why you believe that e.g. it's already, at launch, worth 3x as much as Pivotal Tracker).
What do you pay 10 people in a month? Probably somewhere between $60,000 and $100,000? Is the $90 vs $20 really that big of a difference? Especially if it's a good tool that helps your team be slightly more productive.
I'm not saying that it will, I haven't tried it so I have no idea. I'm just surprised that people really want to shave less than $100 off of the tools they provide their team.
This logic is sound, but any product will be compared price-wise to its competitors if all marketing statements are taken at face value (e.g. they all offer the same benefit of allowing you to manage your projects).
> I'm just surprised that people really want to shave less than $100 off of the tools they provide their team.
The problem is businesses don't just buy 1 tool for their team, they probably buy dozens, and if each one costs and additional $90 per team of ten that adds up quickly. Save money where you can especially when the results are the same.
A perhaps more salient example is one we faced last year: do we switch from Eclipse to IntelliJ? Nearly all of the Java developers we asked preferred IntelliJ. That's ok, no problem ... but we're facing switching 300 people from a free IDE to one that costs several hundred dollars, for internal appdev (not a product company, so all of the above hits the SG&A opex spend ... which the street always wants to be minimal). So, 300x$400, the 150X$400 MSDN subscriptions we have for the MS guys, plus ~1500 MS servers, plus about 300 RHEL servers, plus .... The point is, it all add up, and as Patrick (patio11) has noted several times, large companies much prefer bulk, one time POs to subscriptions. Being able to forecast and accrue for both Capex & Opex is extremely important in many large, thin margin companies, especially ones that are not IT-centric.
Your servers are the lion's share of your opex, so buy the licenses. That said, if Eclipse is working for you, I'm surprised the CE edition of Intellij isn't fine, too.
Of course, if the results are the same, you should decide on price.
But software isn't a commodity product. Each one has strengths and weaknesses. I'm just surprised at the amount of price sensitivity considering a difference of 30 seconds a day between one tool and the other more than makes up for the price difference.
Realistically this tool will be very rough around the edges because its new. All new apps are never polished, and this might not even still be around in 6-12 months. There will be feature requests, bugs to work around, other deficiencies (and some efficiencies as well). $9 per user is a lot to ask for something that is unproven when there are competitors that have a track record for less. Im just being honest this are all things that go in when I consider buying software for my team. And reiterating that this would be only one of many tools I have to buy to keep the wheel on the bus.
This is exactly how I feel. From the marketing, it seems to be exactly what my team needs. But I've got a 50 person team and we're all currently limping along using trello. $450/month is a big spend for something unproven. We're currently leaning heavily towards JIRA, but I haven't pulled the trigger yet.
Which I still wouldn't do. It's a commodity, engine oil, and largely the same between brands. Ditto with PM software. Or most any other software.
If the creators of Matterhorn can continue to shelve egos, keep effecting some humble sincerity and focus on why their tool is better, we may find it's an exception to that rule.
Edit: clarified that the devs are already showing low-ego and sincerity - I realized my wording didn't suggest that earlier.
>Which I still wouldn't do. It's a commodity, engine oil, and largely the same between brands. Ditto with PM software. Or most any other software.
As a former mechanic I would like to point out a flaw in your way of thinking about engine oil as a commodity similar across the board.
Regular engine oils vary in overall quality not due to the oil itself being of substantially better or worse quality itself, but because of the different combinations of surfactants and detergents that the varying brands use, and molecular uniformity allowing tighter tolerances in the engineered part using the oil in question.
The more expensive the motor oil, the less it chemically looks like crude oil until you get to the most expensive types of oils (synthetics), which aren't crude based at all but synthesized using the Fischer-Tropsch process.
Precision engineered parts require synthetic oils. It's akin to placing your smartphone face down on an asphalt sidewalk. At high speeds and temperatures the contaminants in a lower grade oil will destroy the car that calls for the 50 dollar oil cans, and it'd be ill advised to ignore the need for it.
Except, the other sandwich costs 5 dollars, and as far as we can tell, will cause our cars to make the same amount more money as the 50 dollar sandwich, so we need at least some kind of value proposition between the two sandwiches if we are to favor the 50 dollar one. (It's actually quite fun to be reasoning about this at ~2 cuils of overextended analogy.)
I assume that is what the free trial is for. Which would be analogous to getting one free $50 sandwich to test out. Granted, there is the cost of switching from feeding your car a $5 sandwich to feeding it a $50 one considering the sandwich-to-gas converter has to learn how to eat each sandwich. (Is there a word for discussing a point using absurd analogies?)
The difference is $7/person. If the tool saves them 10 minutes over the course of a month, it's paid for itself.
It's more like paying a construction worker $100 an hour and then giving him a hammer that costs $5 instead of $10, but only drives nails at half the speed because it's too light.
$70 dollars is a lot in some organizations. Far more than it should be when compared to the overall budget. Even if a 1% boost in productivity would realize $600 to $1000 in savings, the penny wise culture in many organizations would be stuck trying to swallow a $70 payment.
Well I don't think that comparing costs this way makes too much sense. Running a successful business requires having more income than spendings. If you can achieve the same thing with $20 instead of $90 than you found a potential competitive advantage, even though not a huge one. :) Being frugal works very well for many corporations, including Amazon. I don't see that priced justified compare to JIRA based on the feature list of this tool.
If you're already able to pay salaries, you probably don't care, but for small side-project type startups without any funding but with a few people contributing, it's a _big_ difference.
I suspect this is why JIRA has very different pricing for <=10 and >10 users.
Totally agree with you, yet here is anecdotal evidence: as soon as I introduced it, Slack has had huge success in our company, yet when the time came for getting into paid tier (20 seats), the answer was a resounding "no" from the top of the chain.
when we do project cost estimations at the large medical device development company I work at, we use $15,000 per person month. so to answer your question, 10 people would cost $150,000.
so this just further proves your point that some large corporations are less price sensitive than others.
Agree 100%. Additionally, unless you also ship with substantial APIs, you'll be a nonstarter in the enterprise market, which demands interfaces to other systems (perhaps including code reviews, static analysis, source control (Git[hub], SVN, etc), ticketing, labor/time tracking, resource planning & allocation, SQA testing & validation, human resources, and whatever standard auth (SAML, OAuth, OpenID, LDAP)).
Your pricing is also too high for a large org, especially when one could use something like Phabricator for free. This doesn't even get into MS Project or document management (MS Office? Google Drive?).
Long story short, this looks like a good start and may work well for SMBs, but definitely not a big company.
Just as an aside, my company has just spend several hundred thousand dollars licensing a well-known product & portfolio management (PPM) app. Not surprisingly, all the project managers were 100% in favor of this spend. Also not surprisingly, all the apps management were against it.
Also as an aside, in most large companies, PPM is handled 100% separately, and by different people, than actual product management and dev planning/resource allocation/bug fixing/testing/support/etc.
Be careful with interfaces and enterprise clients. They are both very slippery slopes at first and generally unnecessary unless you're really targeted there (which it appears you are not).
I run a ~15 person startup, and my first thought was "huh, that's reasonable." And didn't think anything else about it. Shit, we pay hundreds for glorified databases for ATS and several other products. I really think pricing it lower will just push you to a less-valuable userbase.
The lower priced clients can be more demanding and less focused by asking for features they don't really need or use.
It would be nice to track feature requests against customer application engagement as well as uptake by said customer. Attempting to make everyone happy leads to MS like products.
Agreed, Jira is pretty hard to beat for small teams and has a large base of plugins and integrations. This looks really cool but needs something a bit more to really stand out. Maybe at $5/user it could take off.
I know a _lot_ about JIRA. I worked at Atlassian for almost four years, in engineering management and product management roles. (Left in 2011, if you care).
JIRA is a total nightmare to configure sensibly, and the UX is complex enough that there's a real learning curve to get your team using it effectively.
The kicker is, that once the combination of JIRA, JIRA Agile, and Confluence are setup correctly, and your team is using them well, there's nothing else like it. It's spectacular for:
- tying specs to issues to code
- surfacing status to non-devs sensibly
- allowing interested folk to keep abreast of projects without having to attend meetings
- getting rid of huge messy email conversations
- figuring out "why the hell did we do that?!"
I'd recommend JIRA + JIRA Agile + Confluence to any team with more than 10 members, with the caveat that you need to find/hire an expert to configure the product and help your team use it effectively.
ninja edit: JIRA will allow you to faithfully model+enforce your fucked-up development process. So, badly-configured JIRA can be one of the least fun experiences of your working life.
Please help - where can I learn to configure our setup correctly? I think our Agile is pretty ok but the integration with Confluence is almost zero. Where do I find an expert to help with the setup?
How would you say TFS (Team Foundation Server) and related tools compare to JIRA? I'm working through TFS training right now and haven't found too many weaknesses with it as of yet.
Jira is insanely configurable - if using jira is painful, that means that your jira admin has not configured it well for your workflow.
The config my company is using makes it somewhat more pleasant than stock bugzilla or trac (though not nearly as convenient as github issues was).
The amount of crap you can turn on if you like can make the interface completely unusable, of course. But that's true in anything with a lot of configurability. It's the cost of being able to build your own process onto the tool.
Small teams generally not looking to pay someone to spend a long time configuring their tools. Configurability is good, but I'd rather have sensible defaults if I can only have one.
I've been a JIRA user for years, and I love it. Rather than turning down jobs over their choice of ticket tracker, consider it an opportunity - take the job and convince them to switch to what you want to use. I made the case for JIRA at several employers because I got tired of less feature-rich alternatives, and the productivity gains were always substantial.
At my current job we use Jira and personally I think it's a pretty good product, at least for a SCRUM workflow. Definitely beats any similar tools I've used in the past. I think the scrum board looks clear, it's easy to create user stories and tasks and it's also easy to switch between an operational and strategic workflow.
We also use Confluence which also seems to do it's job properly as a wiki.
I'm personally considering using Jira for my own projects in the future.
Both, unfortunately. But if given the choice, I'd go with JIRA, simply because I know
of no better solution. To clarify, maybe there are better tools, but it's not my job
to assess all the PM tools out there.
Interesting - we switched TO jira about a year ago (onsite version), and I love it. Yes, it took time to set up our workflow, but I find it does both the small tasks (day-to-day management and issue tracking) and large tasks (cross-team planning) very well, while other tools we used fall down on one or the other. Also, it integrates with everything under the sun.
Jira screens & workflow can be configured as simply as you would like, enabling advanced features as the team grows. If you had a bad Jira experience, it may have been due to those who came up with development policies, rather than the software which implemented those policies. Any specific issues with the software itself?
I'm not the OP, but the last fintech startup I worked at used the hosted version. It was slow (server and client side), a memory hog in the browser, every extra feature was more $$$.
It took a few weeks to get a suitable workflow set up, and in spite of my gripes it's one of the best issue trackers around. I miss working with it on other projects.
What I really want is a fast and lightweight Jira.
I've unfortunately had the same experience with hosted JIRA.
If there should be one place in the world where JIRA runs quickly, it should be on Atlassian's own hosting platform, yet I continue to be amazed at how slow it can be.
For the past two years we have been developing a commercial product that we consider to be a Jira replacement. It is much faster, as easy to use as Facebook, and profoundly more intuitive to work with and learn. Plus it provides full PSA capability (time, billing, expenses, forecasting/scheduling), and can be used for to model the entire business process, not just software development.
Like anything else, there are things we've chosen not to implement in a V1 release, that we will add in later releases. We focused on differentiating ourselves in the market, not just doing a better job of what Jira does.
So, there is hope. :) It's 'real'. It's awesome. And it's just a few months from Release.
I think it's totally the right thing to do. They can always adjust their price as the market dictates (where "market" is people who do/don't pay for the product, not HN comments).
Way better to charge and learn about what paying customers want, rather than make it cheap and hope to eventually convert them.
I'm working hard enough for our company to pay $2 per user for HipChat.
$9 per user is very expensive when it comes to these services at scale. I can see this on a team of 10-15 people, but certainly not on a company wide basis.
I completely agree with you. The project management niche already has a lot of players and I don't see why I should pay double the price when the product i'm getting doesnt have the feature set to justify it.
(Which isn't to say it necessarily should be cheaper, only that it seems surprising to see that price without any attempt to compare or justify why you believe that e.g. it's already, at launch, worth 3x as much as Pivotal Tracker).