
Pivotal Tracker will no longer be free in 6 months - cap10morgan
http://pivotallabs.com/users/dan/blog/articles/1537-introducing-pivotal-tracker-pricing
======
rubyrescue
I've asked about this on HN before (whether others feel the same way). It
makes me feel safer to use pivotal knowing they're going to charge for it.

~~~
Pistos2
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:

* markdown (code blocks, anyone?)

* editing or deletion of comments

* grouping stories

* replying to comments by email

[Edit: list formatting]

~~~
benatkin
I'm surprised how beautiful the UI is in some places while being ugly in other
places. I think they ought to redesign the form for editing stories.

<http://skitch.com/benatkin/rkecs/pivotal-tracker-story-view>

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.

~~~
pivotaldan
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.

~~~
benatkin
Great to hear!

------
dotBen
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)_

~~~
patio11
_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.

------
joshowens
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.

~~~
ambirex
I think that would be excellent point to make to them, if you haven't already.

~~~
joshowens
Thanks,

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.

------
aditya
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]

Wonder what changed?

[1]
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:V05_lTO...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:V05_lTOQ9AcJ:www.pivotaltracker.com/help+pivotal+tracker+faq&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari)

~~~
maxawaytoolong
_Wonder what changed?_

They generally do a mediocre job at best, so their clients didn't renew their
overpriced consulting contracts.

~~~
ekidd
_They generally do a mediocre job at best._

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._

[http://blog.twitter.com/2009/03/pivotal-means-of-crucial-
imp...](http://blog.twitter.com/2009/03/pivotal-means-of-crucial-
importance.html)

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._

<http://mixergy.com/oneforty-laura-fitton/>

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?

~~~
maxawaytoolong
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.

~~~
ekidd
Thank you for your first-hand experience!

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._

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html>

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.)

------
damoncali
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.

~~~
3pt14159
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.

~~~
damoncali
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.

------
taylorbuley
Ah, the Ning approach

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."

@rubyrescue: agree with you 100%

------
rudd
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.

------
xinuc
oh boy,

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

~~~
speby
Then you're getting a lot of value out of it already. $50/month for that many
people working on that many projects is peanuts!

~~~
dasil003
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.

------
KevBurnsJr
Some of their math seems a bit off?

"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."

~~~
dangrossman
Probably meant 12 months for the price of 8.

$7/mo * 12 * 80% * 80% = $53.76 with the discounts. Price of 8 months without
the discounts is $56.

~~~
jackowayed
And then they're probably adding the 6 free months that they're giving
everyone into that.

If you pay for 8 months today, you'll be good for the next 18 months. It's a
stretch, but not really wrong.

------
tomjen3
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.

------
peterarmstrong
Great! I wish they'd been charging for it earlier; it would have been easier
to use on some client projects...

------
toadi
That was a long beta test before going life.

They have a good tool and don't have problem paying a reasonable price for it.

