Last week, we announced that we’re introducing pricing for Pivotal Tracker. Since then, we’ve received a great deal of thoughtful and constructive feedback, and we’re very grateful that the majority of you have shown support of Tracker’s move to be a paid product. We really appreciate all of your positive comments.
Continue reading below for details about changes to pricing that we’re making based on your suggestions, and clarification of some aspects of pricing that may not have been stated clearly, including what remains free.
Our goal was to come up with pricing that’s friendly for both small teams and startups as well as larger companies, and competitive with many other web-based project management and collaboration tools for software development. Given the wide variety of the users and situations (freelance developers and small startups to consulting shops and larger, more established companies), though, it’s understandable that the price plans weren’t a perfect fit for everyone.
We’re making the following changes to Tracker pricing.
- More projects for the Startup plans: To help freelance developers and small consulting companies who might have a number of projects on the go at the same time, we’re increasing the project limit to 5 private projects for the $7 Startup plan, and 10 private projects for the $18 plan. The free individual plan will now allow up to 5 private projects (with no collaborators). As a reminder, archived projects do not count toward any plan limits.
- Free for read only project members: We value and encourage transparency. To support that, read-only members of projects will no longer count toward plan limits. This will allow you to invite as many people to observe progress within projects as you would like.
- All integrations included: We also heard from many small teams and individual developers that you rely on some of the external integrations, for example with Zendesk. We’ve decided to allow all integrations to be available for all plans, even the free individual plans, in addition to full access to the API and all notifications (e.g., email/RSS/Twitter/Campfire).
These changes will be reflected on the site within the next 24 hours.
We’ve done our best to accommodate as many of your suggestions as possible, but recognize that some of you may still find gaps between the updated pricing and what you might consider ideal. Please accept our apologies.
If you’ve already purchased a plan based on the original pricing, and would like to choose a different plan based on these changes, please let us know by emailing tracker@pivotallabs.com.
We’d like to also take this opportunity to clarify the various ways that Tracker can be used free of charge:
- Free for individual use: Tracker is free for your own personal use, with no collaborators, with up to 5 of your own private projects, and 200MB of storage for story file attachments per account.
- Free for you to participate in other users’ projects: Accepting a project invitation and participating in projects that belong to another user’s paid account is free.
- Public projects are free: Projects that are publicly viewable, and the collaborators in these projects, do not count toward any plan limits.
- Free for non-profits and educators: We provide free accounts for qualified non-profit organizations, as well as educators at academic institutions, by request.
Also, we’d like to restate the discounts that we’re offering:
- The 20% introductory discount works as follows: buy a paid plan with the annual billing option on or before Feb 18, and you get 20% off the annual price for the first year. Your credit card will be billed immediately, but you will still receive the remainder of the extended free period, which ends on July 19, 2011, so you actually get a total of up to 18 months of use (until July 18, 2012).
- Pricing with annual billing is the equivalent to paying for 10 months (e.g., the $50 Pro S plan costs $500 per year, when you choose annual billing). The 20% introductory discount is off of the annual ($500) price—so if you purchase the Pro S plan on annual billing by Feb 18, you only pay $400 for the first year.
Please let us know if anything needs clarification in comments here or by emailing us.
