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Pivotal Tracker will shut down

pivotaltracker.com

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Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#111

Post by catwell »

quesera wrote: post #103
kjksf wrote: post #62

Free business idea: clone Pivotal Tracker as a solo dev / small team. People often ask: how do I find business ideas? Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away. This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this. All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally market it as a Pivotal Tra…

Ah, I do love the smell of fresh optimism in the morning! I think the biggest challenges are that a) the vast majority of solo devs capable of pulling this off quickly are well-employed, and b) the timeline for MVP++ is effectively January 1st, else the migrators will make different decisions. And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.

The best way to pull this off is to bet the tool will end up shutting down and build the replacement before it does. A good example of this is Pinboard: Maciej knew the product inside out, and he knew what being acquired by Yahoo meant. So he started building Pinboard in 2009, caught the various exodus waves from Delicious in the later years (esp. 2011) and ended up acquiring it for $35k in 2017.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#112

Post by teeray »

aantix wrote: post #47

The thing that I always liked about Pivotal is that it was visibly obvious that there was only one queue. It forced everyone to ruthlessly prioritize and make the hard decisions. In this moment, do you want me working on this bug, or this new feature? You have to decide - you get one or the other. It avoided the "Everything is a high priority" dilemma.

I also loved that it was adamant about having specific, defined states with no customization. The issue is todo, in progress, done, delivered, accepted… that’s it. Custom issue states are a special kind of hell in JIRA.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#113

Post by diggan »

quesera wrote: post #110
diggan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch. Unless people somehow figure out a way of hosting stuff somewhere else than Amazon/$host_that_charges_per_mb_transit (Hint: they exist) Considering it would have to be a lean operation (assuming bootstrapped), then figuring out basic stuff like "We don't want to pay per MB sent" should be a pretty high…

All true, but I think we might underestimate the amount of data sitting in Pivotal.

I don't think you'd have to consider migration all the data from Pivotal, but lets assume 10% just in case? Lets say that's 100TB in total (on disk), which you could host with 10x storage boxes from Hetzner, 24 EUR each per month, so 240 EUR in total, which includes 10 unmetered connections (1 per box).

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#114

Post by diggan »

DrillShopper wrote: post #109
diggan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch. Unless people somehow figure out a way of hosting stuff somewhere else than Amazon/$host_that_charges_per_mb_transit (Hint: they exist) Considering it would have to be a lean operation (assuming bootstrapped), then figuring out basic stuff like "We don't want to pay per MB sent" should be a pretty high…

What hosting providers would you recommend?

Both OVH and Hetzner offers unmetered connections for their dedicated servers, only had good experience with both so far (besides when one of OVH's data centers burned down, but hoping that was a exceptional situation)

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#116

Post by Terretta »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #43

Are there any open source self-hostable tracking/project management tools that still have a committed team and forward momentum? I used to self-host a Phabricator instance, which I liked a lot, but the upstream maintainer made the reasonable decision to step away. My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of the low-complexity use-cases, while…

Phabricator? OK, how about…

Redmine:

- https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/repository/svn/show...

- https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/Download

RequestTracker:

- https://github.com/bestpractical/rt

- https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/releases

A bit like Phabricator, these are almost frameworks that can do a ticketing UI.

// But really, probably something mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Taiga:

- https://community.taiga.io/t/taiga-30min-setup/170

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#117

Post by thelittleone »

diggan wrote: post #107
quesera wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I do love the smell of fresh optimism in the morning! I think the biggest challenges are that a) the vast majority of solo devs capable of pulling this off quickly are well-employed, and b) the timeline for MVP++ is effectively January 1st, else the migrators will make different decisions. And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.

> And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch. Unless people somehow figure out a way of hosting stuff somewhere else than Amazon/$host_that_charges_per_mb_transit (Hint: they exist) Considering it would have to be a lean operation (assuming bootstrapped), then figuring out basic stuff like "We don't want to pay per MB sent" should be a pretty high…

Dont OVH and Hetzner offer this? If you dont like bare metal perhaps run Coolify for your vercel like platform?

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#118

Post by sub7 »

IMO all of these todo list apps are the same - no moat and not useful enough to be critical for anyone or anything.

No idea how Asana is still valued at $3B it's literally just notepad with checkboxes.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#119

Post by simoncion »

diggan wrote: post #113
quesera wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All true, but I think we might underestimate the amount of data sitting in Pivotal.

I don't think you'd have to consider migration all the data from Pivotal, but lets assume 10% just in case? Lets say that's 100TB in total (on disk), which you could host with 10x storage boxes from Hetzner, 24 EUR each per month, so 240 EUR in total, which includes 10 unmetered connections (1 per box).

> I don't think you'd have to consider migration all the data from Pivotal...

I do. You might not have demands to migrate all data from all of your potential customers, but far, far more people than you might expect treat their issue tracking system as a system of record and external memory for a HUGE assortment of things.

One hugely (and obviously) useful query chain that such a system answers is "Hey, this customer problem sounds familiar. Did we investigate it before? Did we solve it? If so, how? If not, why not?". For long-running projects, it is impossible to select the correct 10% of data to retain to also retain the ability to reliably -er- service those query chains.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#120

Post by pknomad »

raverbashing wrote: post #4

I remember their (pivotal) culture was very unique. Maybe the developers have tired out of mandatory pairing

I worked at Pivotal (2017-2018) and I'll say pairing culture is not for everyone but it was a great experience for me. Much of the experience is dependent on finding someone that is at your "wavelength". It provided good work structure and reduced knowledge silo'ing.

I had good experience with it, fwiw.

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