Pivotal Tracker will no longer be free in 6 months

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.

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.

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...

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?

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 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.

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.

$7/mo * (12 - 2) * 80% = $56.00

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