I can understand the appeal of selling on codecanyon for the existing marketplace you get access to there, but I would consider an independent checkout for the website. Your design and branding are well done and signal high quality, while codecanyon has more of a script/component flea market feel. I think taking someone out of the flow of your site to buy there is a bit jarring and might cause people to reconsider, especially enterprise-y customers.
I also have the sense that you could probably raise your price significantly. Considering what businesses pay for a service like basecamp, they aren't going to blink if you charge them, say, $250 instead of $45 if the software is good. For a business of any size, $250 and $45 are essentially the same as a one-time cost--negligible.
I second everything said here. (I definitely did a double take when I saw the CodeCanyon link).
I think the thing to note with regard to price points is that I might be willing to pay $45 "just to try it out", but that definitely wouldn't happen at $250. I'd have to first make a sound decision about the software (through the demo, etc).
I agree that you could probably charge considerably more for this, though I also agree with the poster in another thread about support expectations for a more business-class-priced piece of software.
You could do both: Keep selling the $45 version that maybe includes access to a general support forum, but sell a $299 version with premium support for one year. Then sell renewals for support agreements! It'll be worth it to most businesses to avoid the headaches of having to deal with self-hosted software on their own, and you'll have a good source of recurring income from existing customers.
I also second selling it for $250 and using something other than Codecanyon. I'd recommend using Fastspring (customer, no other affiliation) since it has no monthly fee and takes a lot smaller cut than Codecanyon.
I'll probably get buried but, here's what I'm going to suggest. Don't deviate from the price too much. I'll tell you why. You're competing with pancakeapp, buggenie, bugify, redmine, bugkick, mantis, Zoho (on some level) and many more, including some of the cheaper hosted basecamp clones. And I'm already considering buying yours. Your pricing is great. And I appreciate what you're doing.
I wouldn't go more than $69 or $79 if you raise your prices at all. If you have future build plans you can always charge for the next version upgrade or specific enhancements. If you want this to be the product you work on and support, try to charge what you can to sustain yourself and grow, but you're going to turn off a bunch of freelancers at some $295 price point that people are suggesting on HN. Somebody said, "for businesses of any size the difference between $250 and $45 is negligible." Um no, These same people (thousands of comments worth) are royally pissed about the Adobe Cloud pricing and are looking for alternatives.
I wouldn't even consider it at $295 price and many others wouldn't either. Why? Because I can get a proven system for many months or permanently at that rate. And for the FOSS ones, I might even become a contributor or leverage the community for enhancements or plugins in those cases.
HN is full of people trying to charge more and a ton of them are going to fail or become irrelevant. Basically your product is for freelancers, not enterprise. That's a fact, luck of the draw, however you want to look at it. Enterprise might trickle in after enough freelancers are rocking your system. Enterprise use Mantis, and that's free. Why should they be turned off by a low price. You might even find small businesses you didn't think of using you product that will be more attracted to your price. There are other things you can do, like try to get bundled with something else, or offer installation service at a rate.
Sell it on your own if you can using Stripe or some other managed provider that isn't taking so much of a cut. Or don't sell it exclusively on codecanyon. you should be making the majority of the money, a lot more than half.
Pancake user here and completely agree. Raising the price will only harm the product, I don't just base applications like this on their demo but rather the quality of the codebase itself. If I spend $250 on an app that promises the ability for me to customise it only to discover it's a poor mixture of PHP and HTML everywhere, I'd probably reconsider buying it.
As it stands, I have no real use for this product because I already use Pancake, but I am inclined to check out the codebase. The benefit of Pancake is that it is built on Codeigniter and Codeigniter is a great, easy-to-use framework to modify.
One possibly unexpected use is for business consulting and accounting. I picked up a copy today to give it a whirl with a few side clients. My firm uses an enterprise solution with many similar features but the usability is horrendous and it doesn't offer online pay options, a project feed, or integrated document filing. The current price was low enough that I could afford to try it out without stressing.
I'm currently using http://www.fusioninvoice.com/ which is a free open source Bootstrap/PHP/MySQL invoicing system. Has clients, estimates, invoices, etc.
Very pretty, but doesn't have project management. This does. So I bought it. Pretty sure I wouldn't have if it was three hundred bucks.
And yes, I'm a solo freelancer, so you're spot on.
I tried all of that. Including Fusioninvoice, Rocketinvoice, Pancakeapp, redmine, mantis, Zoho, BambooInvoice, SugarCRM and OpenERP and many little invoice tool, but none of them offers such great UX and UI. The workflow here is rocksolid.
I didn't know of: buggenie, bugify, bugkick.
Fusioninvoice is nice, but buggy and targets ONE language only, that English. (Why don't people think about i18n and l10n from the beginning, when designing something that's going to be used internationally.)
* Adding PDF.js or pdf2html
* MDV based templating system for invoices and the core
* Web-Component based eCommerce addon
* Integration of Payment Gateways (klarna/paypal/cc)
* Filestorage classes with seamless access to:
rsync, owncloud, aws, dropbox, google drive etc.
Hi. Thanks for the feedback. The app actually already has pdf.js and two payment gateways. I would love it if you could shoot me an email so we can discuss the other features you mentioned...
Beautiful product! Just be aware of the support nightmare that comes along with people trying to install your software in many different environments. I will never, ever create installable software ever again.
Same here. I was selling a PHP+MySQL script and about 20% of my customers couldn't install it despite my verbose instructions. I don't really blame them, I shouldn't have been making non-technical web masters navigate a cPanel account and mess with PHP in the first place. I couldn't possibly provide personal technical support to everyone in need so I granted a refund to anyone who didn't get it working.
As a side note, this is the reason I hate PayPal. They didn't like my refund percentage apparently and simply banned my account. It sucked being treated like some scammer by countless customer support reps just because I couldn't provide tech support to all customers and had a higher refund rate. It's all for the best now though :) Subscription model + Stripe is a godsend.
We have a vendor of some mailing list software that you install your save (basically a tarball of php code). If we have an issue with it, they basically refuse to help unless we give them ssh access to our server.
Stupidly we have this mailing list software running on our production web server (the same one our customers use to access our apps), so we can't do that. I mean I trust the guy to not go in an install a backdoor or delete all of our files (maybe I shouldn't trust him?) but I've always wondered what the liability is there.
Would we basically have to prove he did something malicious if our server crashed the next day or turned into a spam box?
> You don't trust him with ssh access to your server, yet you trust him to run arbitrary code there. That doesn't make any sense.
When people say "ssh access" they usually mean root. The software that's running there, if the server is properly set up, will be running on a restricted account with restricted privileges. Now, granted, even with that there can be quite a bit of damage, but not as much as giving somebody root access to your system.
That's indeed the core of the problem. If your server is properly set up, you probably have one unix user per app, with other home directories not traversable and you can simply add a temporary ssh key. But then again, if customer have difficulties to install your software being just a php / mysql app, chances are great his server is not properly set up.
I think that the proper solution to any paid, self hosted application would be ... to provide hosting for less tech savvy users. Granted, your main selling point is to be self hosted, but you should not alienate people who are interested just by the product itself. And having a less costy per month plan is a great mean to let users try your app before deciding they should takes time or money to educate or hire a sysadmin.
2 days ago I cancelled Basecamp. Why? Pricing.
Duet looks beautiful. I agree, hosting for less tech savvy users would be great. The pricing is great for self-hosted. Frankly, the SaaS adds up quickly, and my hurdle rate is 10x (I have to save 10x the comparable annual dollar cost for Saas it to be sustainable).
Indeed, I was not trying to evangelize SaaS/PaaS :) I'm quite bored of seeing clients wasting founding money on heroku stack, where they first pay incredible amount to have unix processes, then pay a service to have email sending, then one to host uploads, then one to have logging, then on to monitor their app, then they rent a dedicated server anyway because they have specific needs ...
My point is more that it's probably a good thing to provide both webservice and installable app (github, with its github enterprise is a very good example of that, even if way too expansive), to let user choose your product based on what it does instead of what are its requirements and implications.
Yeah ok, but then a) the software should probably not run under root. In fact it should probably not run at all, if you haven't done any kind of audit on it/the developer.
And b) assuming you have done your due diligence on the developer in the first place, why not trust him with access to your machine? And again - you shouldn't grant him root of course, but a shell account with privileges similar to the application would be fine.
But really - Purchasing a script from some back-alley developer you have no knowledge of and placing it on your production server? That's the reckless part.
That sounds like a sticky situation. I don't think it's a matter of trust, but just a matter of principle for me. He can be the most trustworthy guy ever, it still doesn't mean it's a good idea to give him ssh access to your business. That should be sacred. Because of the fact that they are requesting ssh access, I would try to migrate to another mailing list service, probably something hosted like Mandrill or SendGrid. I realize that is probably much easier said than done for you guys, but I think it's necessary in the long run.
In the meanwhile, I guess you can mitigate risk by making strict permissions for the user they ssh in with. Are they usually manipulating data on the production server, or changing code? If it's just code, you can give them access to a development server and push code to production by yourself after you've done a review.
I recommend using acct to monitor the server in addition to limiting the vendor's user. If something happened, you would have a very clear picture of all users' actions in addition to some statistics about system health.
As someone who's built software that others can install I can confirm that it's a lot of work. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it though.
The most important thing is to separate the "self installed" users from the ones using the hosted version (which you might try to monetize at some point).
Point self hosted users to a "community" that can help them while users on your system can email you directly.
It's worked out pretty good for us. We have a much shorter response time for hosted users than self installed. We typically answer most questions on both but it helps separate what's most important (hosted users).
I've been thinking about this and I like the idea of building the software to run on Heroku (or similar). For those that want a self hosted plan you just tell them where to host it and if they want installation outside of that you charge them a decent hourly rate to make it worth it.
I've always liked the option of providing a virtual machine image. Then you get a predictable deployment environment, and the client can run it where they like.
That only half solves the problem. A lot of shops that want self-hosted literally want to host it themselves, to keep data in their datacenters. if you built something deployable to EC2, you could make sure it works on a local Eucalyptus/OpenStack deployment or something. Or you could try to build for OpenShift and tell clients them have to have their own OpenShift cloud. But there's no real easy solution.
I agree. Handling support for this type of product is definitely a challenge. Especially since many customers don't have any experience installing anything on their servers. I've tried to make the installation process as simple as possible (It only requires database credentials), but many customers still have issues.
A free-to-download "test my environment" script could be a good idea to mitigate some of the installation issues. Write a simple one-file PHP script that a prospective buyer can download for free, and run on their target environment. That script can give them a report showing them what works and what doesn't.
This could save you a lot of post-purchase support requests.
I can easily imagine what some of the dependency management issues could be, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the following two options:
In the Java world there is a concept of a .war file which packages everything up so it's easy to deploy on app servers that handle it like: Tomcat or Jetty.
Also what's wrong with giving out a prebuilt virtual image for a single server install? Github enterprise does this.
I'm not a fan of app servers; I'd rather segment my running applications. I use maven-shade or sbt-assembly to create an executable .jar with an embedded web server. (Also makes it easier to just provide a runtime interface with jsvc.)
Also makes it a hell of a lot harder to scale horizontally. With an app layer you can just horizontally scale your app server stack and put a load balancer in front of it and you're done.
I don't know where you're getting your information, but your claims do not match my experience or, apparently, that of pretty much anyone else using Play (embedded Netty) or Dropwizard (embedded Jetty with a handler). Or anyone who is writing a Rails app or a Django app or anything else that lives as a standalone HTTP handler.
I have a Puppet script that sets up deployment on a new server. Puppet does not care how many machines the application is running on. Neither does the load balancer/reverse proxy in front of it; it takes a list of IPs and does its thing across them.
I have never seen an app server do anything that wasn't essentially this process, only with more XML and aggravation.
Not really the same because you can say "We don't support IE version x" and be done with it. There are much more variables at play in a server setup: PHP, MySQL, web server, OS etc.. Each of these can be running different versions and each instance (of PHP for example) can be configured completely differently from the next.
I've wanted a nice looking project/client management system that I could host on my server for quite some time. Unfortunately there are very few options that fit this criteria so I created my own. I would love some feedback - good or bad.
Yes, I struggled with how that should work. I ended up deciding that the default 'project tab' should open whenever you navigate between projects, regardless of what tab you were viewing before. I'm definitely open to changing it if enough people think the current implementation is awkward.
There isn't an overall calendar. I thought about adding one. I wasn't sure how valuable it would be though.
>There isn't an overall calendar. I thought about adding one. I wasn't sure how valuable it would be though.
I totally understand. You've put together a great product where you can (and should) build more features based on customer feedback (rather than trying to build every feature imaginable and never launching).
This looks great. One bit of feedback I have is that this seems needlessly more complex than Basecamp (especially new Basecamp), which could limit its usefulness for some people.
One of my favorite features of Basecamp is that it's not opinionated towards one form of project. It gives you the ability to add anything to a project, whether it's dates, tasks, files, discussions, etc., but it doesn't show features unless you're actually using them. If you don't have any discussions in a project, it doesn't show a "Discussions" section on the project overview; just a small link to "add the first discussion" if necessary.
Perhaps hide the more specialized features such as Reporting, "On Schedule" indicators, Clients, Invoices, due dates for projects, etc. until the user needs them for their type of project. This would make your product more universally appealing without sacrificing underlying functionality if the user wants it.
Just out of curiosity - your site doesn't seem to mention whether customers would receive product updates or not, or even if there will be any. Is this something you have planned out?
You should, it would make people more confident in it.
By the way, you point out that people get the full source-code so they can edit it. Have you figured out how well this would work with updates? It might be wise to add some customisation methods you have more control over (like a box to add custom styles), since otherwise people might edit the source and then break things come updates.
This would be a good price differentiation point - people have said they'd pay $45 to buy it just to try and others are suggesting $250 as a reasonable price for businesses.
So why not ~$50 with no updates, then $250 with updates for next n months, $500 lifetime and then add support options, or something along those lines.
1. I did not find any word on -- updates, documentation, support or future upgrades from the developer. These things are more important. Who will maintain this project on long-term? And that's why SAAS based offering sells.
2. Also without a trial, I will never buy a solution, self-hosted or SAAS! I need to use it often to know that its the best-fit for my workflows.
3. And this being a company's project-management tool, should be tried and tested well: stable, secure and should work perfectly out of the box! I don't want to put time in maintaining another project. :)
4. Lock-in? Is there an import or export option from-and-to Basecamp or others?
Hi. I just updated the pricing page to address most of the points in #1. It would be impossible for me to offer a trial since this software needs to be hosted on your own server.
There's no lock in. It's on your own server so you have full access to the mysql database with all of the info.
Hmm, I'd consider setting up an EC2 image with this pre-installed. You can spin up copies for people that want to try it out with their own data (you'd run the server, charge them a nominal fee, and they'd get a full inspection of the system). When they choose to buy, you give them a copy of their image. They can run it on amazon, or export the VM to run on any machine they like. Or, they can install the software and drop-in the database images from the VM.
Nice work! At $49 you are seriously undervaluing this product. I'd think you could easily charge $395 or more. If I'm looking for a self hosted option for project management, I'm likely in an org w/ some security restrictions, etc - AKA the Enterprise. $49 may even lead me even think it's "too small" to buy if i'm the Enterprise purchaser...
As someone who has sold self hosted software for almost 10 years, there is a whole different level of "hand holding" expected when a customer spends $395 versus $49. We are in the process of re-doing all our pricing with our new release specifically to make the price lower.
When I first decided to start building this product, I had just started my freelance career. I seriously considered ActiveCollab which is in the price range you're talking about, but I just didn't have the resources to buy it. I want this to be accessible to as many people as possible, even those people just staring their business. But I agree, I will definitely lose out on some customers because they think it's too small. Perhaps as the product evolves and includes more features, I will consider raising the price.
I would make the point that it might make sense to leave the initial price point low, and add plugins perhaps or a marketplace, and support options at higher price points.
You can sell the "infinite" (the bits) for low price (price IS different than value), and sell the "scarce" (your time on customized plugins, install time, training, etc...) for more, and the customer will often be very happy with this arrangement.
As well, this should get you more sales, and a larger community. This is an important point to consider, as an active community can often make or break a product like this.
As a side note, I am considering purchasing this for my own consulting use. At that price, it becomes almost an impulse buy. Thank you for making this an option!
You could take out some existing features from the current version in order to sell the full one to a higher price. You are in a competitive market...more money means more dev power.
And you probably want to make sure it has enterprise features, like LDAP/AD integration, etc. (didn't check the features to see if this is there already).
That's a pretty simple pricing, and it'll make you 1,000 time more sane than putting it on CodeCanyon and fighting with dads and moms trying to setup this on their shared host with a thousand other app and site.
This month estimate earnings on CodeCanyon: 100 (sales) x $45 x 0.7 (best case) = $3,150
Support overhead: 100 person.
You'll need 20 single user license sales, and less than 6 sales in the enterprise edition. That's just 26 person to support. Don't forget that enterprise people are more inclined to give you the $200 and get the thing setup.
I am currently also selling my product (newsletter mailer) via codecanyon. My main concern leaving codecanyon is how to drive potential customers to my site. As you already said there is a huge support effort on codecanyon, due to "inexperienced" customers.
- An overall calendar would be good.
- Software updates would be good, including what you're about to update and what type of php version the updates need.
- Is it possible to change the text in the html ? I'm thinking about using another language because I live in Europe.
- Not sure I understand the concept of using the timer. When I click on something else, the timer stops, and when I go back, it starts again, and eventually I end up with a list of numbers. Also, the timer stops at 99 minutes, is that right (didn't check it) ?
The site's not loading right now. Is the customer able to see the timer ?
If so, give us the ability to remove it.
- Not sure you should stay on Codecanyon for this if you plan on giving support.
- Make sure you offer good support, even if it comes at a price.
- It's not really loading very well right now but that's probably because of HN.
I now see 2 screens underneath each other. I will have to come back and give it another try.
- Make How To videos.
I imagine the sort of people who's primary requirement for project management software is that it costs less than $20 per month to host 10 projects are not going to make the best customers with the highest retention in the long run.
Income yes, but profit no. Hosting is not free. You can, of course, work towards minimizing hosting costs, but time spent on that may cut into other priorities.
Of course, as mentioned above, saving time not having to support customer installations could (easily?) offset hosting costs.
This looks great. However, the layout is unusable on mobile. Rather than allowing me to use the desktop layout on mobile, all of the page elements are layered on top of each other in a very garbled way. Maybe set a min-width for the page?
Thank! I use both fairly often. I have a strong preference for Foundation, but bootstrap has a lot more components, which is useful when I'm building web apps. Foundation is great for websites.
Wow, It's not just a task tracker. I must say i was happy to see that it can take care of the invoicing side of things too. This would be a great solution for webdesigned or other contract workers.
Looking at the invoicing system, it's hard to figure our all the options. But if it's good I may decide move from http://freeagent.com/ to host my own. Are there any more plans to extent the financing side of the app ? Or any particular roadmaps for the product ?
Yes, I have a ton of plans for the app. I would have loved to build them all, but I probably would have never shipped if I tried. Right now I'm just gathering feedback and then I will start adding the features that people want most in a couple of weeks.
Just a heads up, maybe you could rename twitter-hogan to something else. I'm getting ´ReferenceError: Hogan is not defined´ and a blank page because "twitter" is blocked on my corporate network. (http://f.cl.ly/items/2o2p3c2X173Z3u2t1F2j/bug.jpg)
Let me start this off by saying that I love Basecamp and use it everyday...but I am very intrigued by Duet. The app looks really great and I am a fan of the way the UI and navigation are set up.
What I think you are missing however are Discussions. I find discussions to be the single most valuable feature that Basecamp has to offer. I also love that for any todo or file, project members have the ability to comment on that item, which is essentially a discussion in itself.
The ability to keep all of the conversations that are taking place with various members of both my internal and external teams in one place is incredibly helpful. It eliminates the need to track disperate conversations across gchat, gmail, skype etc, and gives all team members transparency into the various facets of the project.
I think adding these features would make your app much more robust and compelling.
I'm so happy you're selling this. After years of dicking around with free open source plugins and scripts I have started avoiding them. The authors abandon them, they have no road map, no future, bad design, no time to read feedback.
But when I see a for-profit script I know that the creator has an incentive to keep pushing updates and maintanance and design.
Also, you should sell your script yourself AS WELL as selling it on CodeCanyon. That way you can funnel people towards your site and make more money per sale PLUS get the benefits of being on CodeCanyon's community.
The internet is NOT Walmart, there's no exclusivity contract, you don't have to sell your product or service in only one place.
This is beautifully designed, and I think you ought to raise the price. Lots of comments about the potential support headaches are spot-on; price as many of those out as you can.
Check out patio11's online talks for more rational.
Amazing looking product. Well done for nailing the visuals. Aggressive pricing is a good move also, seems like the right way to get some good traction. I would caution against the 'free forever' approach you've taken. Maybe free updates for all 1.x releases, or free updates for 12 months will make it easier for you to sustain the business.
FYI: I had no issues accessing your page this morning, however a couple of hours later and I'm getting this from Sophos AV:
Access has been blocked as the threat Mal/HTMLGen-A has been found on this website.
I have never thought about this feature for an app like this however now that you mention it, this is something I could see myself finding very useful, especially printing the Tasks list
It would be great if there was some sort of auto invoice (it seems you have to enter the time details in manually)
The calendar seems to always require scrolling down, it would be great if it fitted in the view
Also, mobile support if its not there, for iPad at least with a home icon
And agree with other posters here, a timer that work across page refreshes and overall calendar showing all tasks / deadlines for all projects would be awesome.
WOW, simlply wow!
I WILL buy it, when I get paid for my current project! I was just building this myself, incl. a url shortener and analytics, but this UI blows it away! Every other solution out there I tried is inferior. I tried many other invoicing WebApps.
* Sir, can I help you by contributing??
* I can code/sysadmin/design
I do think this is a market long forgotten and I do love the application itself. Congratulations on getting it to market!
The one thing I can really agree on here is the installation procedure involved with users. I know someone brushed on it but it may be worth looking into Linode StackScripts and Amazon EC2 Images?
It might not even be a problem or suit your needs but I think it might help in some cases
When trying to access the demo in Firefox 20 it throws an error for LESS:
A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.
It definitely has something to do with the current load on my server. I didn't adequately plan for it at all. I should have at least compiled my less files and minified/concatenated my js files.
It sends an email letting them know they have an invoice, the amount of the invoice, and gives them a link to the invoice in the portal. Once I add the ability to generate pdfs, it may also include the pdf as an attachment.
Clean looks. I immediately checked out the task timer feature which does not work as expected. If you start the timer and then go to the dashboard (I should expect to see all "active" tasks here) and back the timer is stopped.
I currently use TaskCoach to keep track of all my tasks and invoice my clients on a hourly basis.
Yes, you need to keep the task open for the timer to continue to run. You would want it to keep running in the background? It seems like it would be easy to forget about if it's implemented that way...
I rolled my own MVC implementations for the client and server. The backend is in php. The client MVC implementation uses Backbone events and the backbone router, but everything else is custom. jQuery of course, Twitter bootstrap, IconJar, some free icons I found on 365psd, glyphicons.
If the developer is reading, it looks like you've got some bugs with tasks. Editing the task weight always returns an error stating 'Please enter a value no larger than 99NaN'. Also the description in that modal is 'Please enter a value between 1 and 99NaN'.
I second all the CodeCanyon suggestions and you should move away from there.
I am definitely going to get this. Though I wanted to ask if it has some sort of import feature. I am switching from BC and it has loads of data and projects there.
Well done, love the idea! Just to let you know on the http://www.duetapp.com/features page it says 'helpw' instead of 'help' under the messaging section.
Hmm. There is definitely a lots of validation on both the client and server. The demo refreshes every 30 mins so I'm not able to see what you're referring to. Can you shoot me an email with the issue you're referring to and I'll look into it asap. Thanks.
Hi, this looks like a nice and affordable product for freelancers like me. Great job! If I purchase this app now, will I get free updates (eg, bug fix) for at least a certain period of time?
One more question from me since I can't seem to log into the demo now. Will I be able to disable certain features (eg, payment through Paypal - I would rather get a check)? Thanks.
I can't find the system requirements. It's difficult to buy software you'll run yourself without understanding what dependencies I'll need to support in order to host it.
Nope. That's a good idea, but not sure whether I'll add it. I will definitely be adding archive functionality within the next week or two though. So you can archive a file/project, which gets it out of your way until you want to see it again.
I actually didn't use any frameworks (server or client). They always feel to heavy for what I'm trying to accomplish, especially php frameworks. I rolled my own MVC implementations for both the client & server. I've been thinking about porting the entire thing to Laravel + Backbone, to see if I like it better, but I haven't made any decisions yet. If I do, it will probably be a month or two before I get started.
It seems a bit ironic to use a front-end framework, but not a back-end framework. You should look at http://fuelphp.com, another alternative to Laravel and is a light weight PHP 5.3 framework.
No, clients can't add tasks. It would be extremely simple to modify the app so that they can. It wouldn't take more than 5 minutes to make that change. I can help if you decide to purchase it...
Speaking from years of experience with a self hosted PHP application, I'd recommend a "recommend hosters" section in your FAQ. Setup an affiliate program with them - most of your users will be happy to send you the referral to know that you recommend and have a good experience with them.
Ones to really watch out for are Godaddy shared hosting (note that updates to .htaccess files can take many hours to actually show and performance is frequently abysmal) and "Hostgator" (they do something funky on some of their shared hosting servers that breaks custom user session support if you use that). You'll soon find there is a huge difference between quality and cheap shared hosting.
I'm wondering if there are easy to follow, step-by-step instructions on setting it up on my own PC. Can Joe Sixpack set this up without too much grief?
I'd like to use this for my own projects, but I'm way out of practice doing this stuff.
I'm working on a third party installer for installing web applications on cpanel, get in touch at my email on profile.
(This isn't for cpanel addons, it's for installing packaged applications directly to a user's cpanel-based hosting account.)
It would be PHP-based and might work as an installer, user just needs their control panel login username/password from their webhost. (Too bad cpanel doesn't do oauth2). I've already tested with some of the major web hosting providers.
"Joe Sixpack" isn't using this software. This is a self-hosted project management tool. "Joe Sixpack' isn't in this equation. They call a pro. By your logic, WordPress is challenging to install without Softaculous, and even hard to understand by "Joe Sixpack" with Softaculous. Keep it in perspective of who this is for.
I also have the sense that you could probably raise your price significantly. Considering what businesses pay for a service like basecamp, they aren't going to blink if you charge them, say, $250 instead of $45 if the software is good. For a business of any size, $250 and $45 are essentially the same as a one-time cost--negligible.