I'm hoping getting some money out of PT would make them act faster on the things most in demand in their user feedback site. http://community.pivotaltracker.com/pivotal [It appears as though] they've not been doing anything at all on these fronts for many, many months:
Also, why not have an expanded, non-editing view? The <input> elements do take up extra space when just viewing the extra fields.
It seems to me that they're missing some of the finer points of Single Page Application design. I wish I had a good guide I could point them to.
Again, though...they're totally nailing other parts of single-page application design. It's an amazing app that could be made a lot better with some refinement.
The recent redesign of the outer pages and the layout was the first phase of a big UX overhaul - viewing/editing of individual stories is next. Working on design for this now, we plan to dive in to implementation in the next few weeks.
You can hover over the left-side icons of a story (such as the comment/speech bubble) to get a read-only popup containing most of the details of the story.
I hope so too... I know that when I'm busy working on client projects, my homegrown stuff doesn't get the attention it needs. I know that for me, a revenue stream would ensure that one public-facing free project I run would get a lot more love.
I'm a huge fan of Pivotal Tracker and I'm delighted they are going to be charing a reasonable rate for this valuable service. Also delighted they are keeping it free for open-source, non-profit and individual use.
However I read that they are going to require you to pay for the upper tiers to use JIRA sync and other such features... wasn't JIRA support built into Pivotal Tracker by the community/3rd party or is this now their own implementation?
It would be wrong, imo, if they were charging a higher tier to use a community built plugin.
(why anyone would want to use JIRA is another matter, however)
It would be wrong, imo, if they were charging a higher tier to use a community built plugin.
The nature of contributing to OSS is that you are spending your time for the benefit of for-profit companies. That is, very possibly, a poor business decision if you are not being compensated directly while doing it. If you aren't being compensated, then you should expect to receive everything the MIT license lists under Section 42: Stuff The End User Owes You.
I actually prefer JIRA. I find tracker to be exceptionally difficult to use when trying to organize a large number of tasks and bugs. Turns out I have a lot of problems with my code :).
Integration with JIRA is a built-in feature (not community contributed), along with Zendesk, Bugzilla, Lighthouse, and Get Satisfaction integration. More are coming, but these tend to be the mostly costly to support.
And the idea with these integrations is that your team can do focused collaboration (with Tracker) on some subset of issues/bugs that are stored in a larger, more widely used tracking system at your company (eg JIRA).
As a recent PT convert, I am really starting to get into the workflow their app allows. It is certainly much better than basecamp or lighthouse.
That being said, they put a heavy penalty on having clients on board as part of the process. I have three projects, five part-time coders, five clients, and 1 virtual assistant to keep it all running. I have to pay $100/month to keep going?
I don't need Jira or Zendesk, so why should I pay $50/month? I could probably setup two $7 accounts and one $18 account and be fine - but then I have to deal with the pain of logging in and out just to do work?
I would happily pay $25-$30 a month, but $100 seems off the mark to me.
I did send them an email. Hopefully they will listen, Github did and I think their pricing plans are better for it. I've already upgraded once on github as my needs grew.
Heh. Fascinating how they used to say that they could afford to keep Tracker free because their meat and potatoes was "software consulting":
How can you afford to offer such a service, completely free? What is your business model?
Pivotal Labs is a software development consultancy, we get paid to build software, from web applications for startups to large-scale enterprise systems. We built Tracker to support our own projects, and now share it with the agile community, but it is not a primary source of revenue for our company.[1]
Interesting. Twitter seemed quite enthusiastic about their two "Pivots": When we began working with Pivotal last year, we knew they'd be a big help but we didn't expect how much they would contribute to a healthy and attractive work culture.
On the other hand, Pivotal's price is steep, and you have to hire their programmers in pairs: It’s about $15,000 a week for a pair. And so what we came up with was, “Look. You don’t have much money...” But we came up with this idea that if we do a six week run, and he gave me a very slight bit discount, so like a six week was going to be $84,000 we could get a minimum viable product up and launched.
Given the price of hiring Pivotal Labs, it sounds like Twitter and Laura Fitton were pretty enthusiastic. I wonder how to reconcile that with what you've been hearing—has Pivotal Labs gone through a growth spurt in the last year or two?
Hi, I'm actually a Pivotal engineer (in our Singapore office) and while I can't comment on either of the examples above I do want to clarify that clients don't have to hire Pivotal engineers in pairs. We do pair on all production code and our strong preference is for mixed teams of client engineers and Pivotal engineers. We strongly encourage even team sizes so that there is rarely an odd engineer out.
I know many people here charge $150/hour. 15k/week for two persons working 40 hour each is about $187/hour which doesn't look unrealistic to me. That's not to say they're cheap, they certainly aren't, but if you consider that a company has many expenses beside employees salaries then it's not that high.
Perhaps the biggest thing here is that you must hire a pair, so it actually comes to about $374/h, but if it's true that you get the job much more quickly with a pair then I don't see the issue.
Twitter is a unique case in that their engineers in 2009 were even worse than the ones at Pivotal. They still had outages every day, so how good could the "pivots" have been?
But my point still stands as Twitter did not renew their contract...
It's also not what I've "been hearing"... I've had to work directly with Pivotal people.
I was curious about Pivotal's consulting work, because even very good software consulting companies go downhill quickly when they try to scale. Joel Spolsky described it perfectly: I don't need to name names, here, this cycle has happened a dozen times. All the IT service companies get greedy and try to grow faster than they can find talented people, and they grow layers upon layers of rules and procedures which help produce "consistent," if not very brilliant work.
If Pivotal has a nucleus of really talented people, it makes sense for them to become a scalable product company. (Although I'm not really convinced by Pivotal's proposed pricing plans, at least for consultants with several smaller projects going on at once.)
I can't speak to your first-hand experience with them. But do you think they made this pivot because their contracts were not renewed? Or is it possible -- I'd speculate, probable -- that developing a business model around Tracker is a much more appealing prospect for them than software consultancy?
Software consultancy gets old quickly. You trade your steady paycheque being told what to do, for a not-so-steady paycheque being told what to do. Even at $15K per week, the revenue is not as scaleable as the potential revenue from charging for Tracker would be.
Again, I can't speak to your first-hand experience. But it struck me as sounding a bit mean spirited. I'm not sure if that was your intention. If they can churn out Tracker, which is pretty good, but are doing a mediocre job with some contracts, there's a correlation there. It doesn't mean they are necessarily the cause for the mediocrity. The cause might boil down to "fit" and this may be the reason why the contracts were not renewed.
EDIT: Actually, on further investigation (which I should have done before posting this), Pivotal Labs is a lot bigger of a consultancy than I thought. It's more than probable that only a small handful actually touch Tracker. I was always under the impression that their consultancy was a lot smaller, so they could ensure consistently high quality.
The speculation here is certainly understandable. The reality, though, is that Pivotal's consulting business is growing stronger than ever - we're over 100 great Rails developers now, with offices in SF, NYC, Boulder, and Singapore, and we are completely booked. All of our business comes from word of mouth - mostly existing and past clients. Check out some of them here: http://pivotallabs.com/clients.
Many clients do come back to us, but we actually try hard so that they don't ever "have" to - by leaving them with a maintainable, tested codebase, and effective engineering practices like TDD/BDD, pairing, aggressive refactoring, etc. We even help hire and train their own developers.
We kept Tracker free for almost three years, and over 180,000 people have signed up for it so far. We use it on all our projects, and the widespread adoption has been a great calling card for our consulting business. The decision to begin charging for it was not an easy one, but the reason is simple - we want to make Tracker better, faster, and establishing a revenue model for Tracker will allow us to devote more resources to it, including a larger dev team, support staff, and operational/hardware capacity.
Our goals are not to transition from a consulting company to a product one, but to do both equally well, and it's hard to do that when one side of the business has to fund/support the other.
Making money with a product >>>>>>> making money with consulting, and I say this as an owner of a consulting company. If we had a product like PT (which is excellent, and we use it daily on all our projects), we would stop accepting new clients and gradually make a switch to a full-fledged software product shop, which is what 37Signals did, and looks like PL are doing. Best of luck to them.
This is a little self serving, because I make/sell a PT competitor (http://trackjumper.com), but I'm curious - how much is a bug tracker worth to you?
I'm charging $20/month for unlimited everything (users/projects/storage/etc), and can't shake the feeling that some customers find this to be a hefty price tag and others would pay $200 or more.
BTW - I'm glad they're charging - it's a great product and they deserve to make some scratch from it.
Split test it dude. Just split test it. My guess is that you would be better off getting more people in the door with a $5 a month account and then having them upgrade to $18 then $50, but for something like this you can't afford not to test test test.
You're right. And I will. Just trying to figure out a little about why people might think $8 (or $100 or whatever) is a good deal. What sort of work they're doing - that sort of thing.
The other thing is the feature set seems to be a terrible way to segment users. I'm not sure the price people are willing to pay has much to do with the number of projects/users/etc they need. I'm looking for a way to segment based on willingness to pay, not my own convenience.
For example, one customer was a utility company. They didn't care at all about price. A freelancing shop was skittish at $8. Neither one needed a boatload of features.
Pricing starts at $7 for up to three collaborators, so does that mean individuals and up to two others? Looks like they'll stay free for public projects, but I don't see any mention of individual accounts save on the pricing page's "free for individual use (no collaborators), with up to 2 private projects."
Interesting timing, as my team was about to start using Pivotal Tracker for our project. Hopefully this encourages them, and the fact that they'll have to pay $50/month after July doesn't scare them away. Not really a big price tag, but any money over free is the hurdle.
Have been a very loyal user of pivotal tracker, I have 11 projects with 12 collaborators. The smallest plan I could choose is $50 per month. That was shocking me a bit, before I knew I can archive my old projects :P
Well not necessarily. Number of people and projects is easy to measure, but it's far less indicative of value than, say, hours used.
In my past life as a freelancer, I might have 10 or 20 projects going, each with a couple collaborators, but it still only added up to 40 hours of work for me, and the collaborators were negligible.
Now at my startup we only really need one project with 4 collaborators, but we're getting 2-3x the value out of it.
I don't have trouble paying for full-time dev collaborators, but the head count could become a pain point once you roll in various tangential roles such as management, support and sales, etc. I'm not sure the best way to handle this without opening loopholes, but I'm hoping they reach out to some of their users who aren't quite so developer heavy as pivotal labs to discuss options.
"Choose a plan with annual billing on or before February 19, 2011, and receive an additional 20% discount for the first year. That’s 18 months of use for the price of 8."
Its a great thing that they are starting to charge for their service, but I wish they would charge a certain amount per user with an option to pay for each additional service the team would need.
I just hate paying for more users than I would need or, integration with JIRA.
