Tell HN: Pivotal Tracker removes non-enterprise price tiers | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Pivotal Tracker removes non-enterprise price tiers

90 pointstempestn60 comments

Just got this email from VMware re Pivotal Tracker:

To our Pivotal Tracker customers,

Effective March 31, 2024, Pivotal Tracker “Startup” and “Standard” subscriptions will no longer be available for purchase and yearly auto-renewals will be canceled. Going forward, Pivotal Tracker will only be available for purchase as an “Enterprise” subscription. If you are interested in purchasing an “Enterprise” subscription to continue your Pivotal Tracker access, more information can be found here.

You will continue to have access to Pivotal Tracker until your yearly subscription expires. Upon expiration of your subscription you will be given 60 days access at no charge to ensure you have time to migrate any needed data, please review the download instructions here.

Regards, Tanzu Division

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Rough. PT's "automatic" sprint planning and velocity measurement has always been a killer feature for me as a solo user. Even if the free plan isn't going away immediately, the writing's on the wall.

Anybody know of other task/project management software that has similar automatic velocity measurement and sprint planning functionality? It does so much for my productivity that I might just build something myself if there's nothing else around.

Linear has something velocity like: https://linear.app/docs/project-graph - I am not using it and I don't know how it compares to PT.

This is interesting but misses the real killer PT feature: closing the loop between velocity and planning:

1. Tasks have points 2. Sprints have duration 3. Points accomplished per sprint is velocity 4. Use the average velocity of the past few sprints to pull some number of tasks off the top of the backlog. Those are the tasks for the next sprint.

It makes sprint planning basically transparent. I just prioritise the backlog (sometimes lazily) and it keeps me pretty productive. It's almost gamification in a way, but not quite.

If you have a prioritised backlog and you’re working in priority order then there’s not much value in sprints — is there? Sprints provide value when you can’t just churn through tickets one after the other in priority order. Sprint planning is time consuming because sprints are useful when you need to plan.

You could use Linear’s cycles and milestones but you probably don’t need any of that structure if you’re just working ticket by ticket.

I've not looked at Linear - but when I was freelancing I used Pivotal (free account) to just put all my clients' requests into one long queue (I had about 8 clients at any one time).

I put in a very random guess as to the points value of each request - nothing more than "trivial, easy, difficult, bastard-bloody-hell-shit-buckets-difficult".

I had Tracker set to work in "weekly sprints" - but they're not really sprints at all - it's just a unit of measure. Internally it averages the number of points completed over the last three weeks, uses that for an average velocity, then moves the date markers on the "backlog" list to match.

Then, when a client asked when something will be done, I could pretty accurately say "unless something urgent crops up, it will be '18th-24th March'" (where "something urgent crops up" means I insert a story at the top of the queue instead of at the end).

PT automatically adjusts the number of stories that make it into a sprint. They don't really have a concept of sprint actually... it is just average velocity over time and the number of stories that can fit into that average.

If a PM wants to see how adding in just one more feature impacts the schedule, they can just drag the pointed story into the queue and see what gets pushed out to the next week.

If a developer goes on vacation, it is easy to see how that impacts the schedule cause you can subtract their average velocity.

Most people don't understand this killer feature of PT unless they've actually spent a bunch of time using it. It really enables you to do accurate project estimates, if you do it right.

Source: worked for cloudfoundry/pivotallabs

I never liked their velocity diagram. I've had situations where I had great progress when it showed low, and I had situations when bugs and setbacks made the "velocity" measure meaningless. You can even inflate it with lots of "important" little tasks.

It's just a bad metric to optimize for.

Almost all metrics are bad to optimise for. If you don't use it skillfully it won't work. Even if you do, it's a guide at best.

Back in my enterprise days I remember getting decent results with the Portfolio add-on to JIRA. Like all things JIRA it’s a bit heavy and slow, but full of features

They renamed it a few years ago, removed a bunch of features, and have been gradually re-adding them because they realized that Portfolio was only useful with those features.

I'm still waiting for them to re-add features around capacity estimation by team member per project, a feature that was in Portfolio in 2017. At least they finally fixed the biggest issue I had with Portfolio, that the "save changes" view didn't have any filters.

Yeah, if it doesn’t already exist this could be the forcing function. I know a lot of people like that functionality you describe.

The entire VMware rugpull of all subscriptions is a huge dick move. I hope they eat a bag of dicks and go under entirely.

Well, people have had that sentiment about Oracle even longer than Broadcom, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for either of them.

Because they're eating enterprise dicks, and there's big money in them there bags.

Unfortunately correct. But personally, I won't even entertain an Oracle solution with my department's budget because of this. I wish more IT decision makers would do the same.

I hear you. I canceled our Dyn contract when they were acquired and let them know why. Unfortunately it isn’t always so easy to switch.

I think you can blame Broadcom now.

> Upon expiration of your subscription you will be given 60 days access at no charge to ensure you have time to migrate any needed data, please review the download instructions here.

You don't disrupt customer businesses like this just because you want to eliminate their pricing tier.

A more likely way to handle that situation is to grandfather in the current subscribers (for a much longer period), and only disallow new subscribers at that tier.

You do if you want to make the big enterprise money with little cost.

Grandfathering in is nice, but it really just pulls the bandage off slower in the long run.

I'm sure it makes bottom-line business sense, if you want to be enterprise-only.

(You'll alienate numerous small companies and startups, who will never buy a VMware product again, but only a small percentage of those will grow enough to become enterprise customers.)

A slow bandage pull in this case means giving giving a large window, for the customer to migrate on customer's own timeline, such as after completion of projects using the tool.

The sad reality is that if a company "makes it" they'll buy from vendors they swore they'd never touch again - if it makes sense at the time.

This is why the big vendors continue to exist. Sucks for us, but that's life.

I, for one, know how to hold a grudge.

Also, seems like the reputability of the vendor should be a factor in vendor selection. Why would one willingly use a vendor with an apparent mindset of "screw you, the moment it makes sense for me"?

(Maybe because a decision-maker didn't expect to personally be on the hook if the vendor also screws their company, in the same well-known ways it's screwed others? If screwing happens before the decision-maker moves on: "I'm shocked; shocked! Who could have foreseen this costly mess?")

Because once you're past a certain size, the company, even if it DOES get screwed, only gets screwed in the ass, and the people making the decisions live up in the head and experience no pain or issue.

Once you realize that you start to notice exactly the difference between companies that are selling to the people who will use the product, and those selling to their bosses, and those selling to the bosses' bosses.

I once tried to halt a bad enterprise sales purchase before it had been signed...

But some people (who didn't understand the use of the software) had already already invested some face in the purchase.

Maybe also a bit of "nobody ever got fired for buying ___", and the enterprise sales rep seemed very reassuring. :)

Only a good company does to its good customers. When a company gets acquired, they dont treat the acquired customers like they are good customers.

Boy do I regret recommending Pivotal Tracker to people over the years, imagine doing something like this to paying customers - nasty.

It's not like you could have predicted Broadcom would buy it. The best tools for the job always change over time. It's why I'm not using Eudora for email anymore.

I'd use Eudora (the binary built in 2007? with updated TLS) over Outlook any time in 2024.

Anyone have recommendations for alternatives that would require minimal adjustment for someone accustomed to Pivotal? From a quick glance ClickUp or Monday.com look ok maybe? JIRA is obviously common but presumably would have a large learning curve. Asana?

Also while Pivotal does offer an export, most alternatives don't appear to import from it. Though maybe that will change with this. And I suppose a middleman could be used.

Linear actually looks quite good, but I'm a bit afraid of committing to a smaller option now and ending up with another rugpull.

I can recommend Linear. Very nice UX.

I think the higher level project stuff is a little bit lacking, especially on the reporting side, but it’s definitely a leaner option than the incumbents.

Linear was awesome when we used it in 2019/2020. The only reason we didn't commit to it long term was that it is impossible to get our business people to commit to estimates that don't at least have the appearance of being a time period.

As others have said, Linear looks nice (no real experience). https://plane.so/ is an open source option that I have also not played with.

I am always on the lookout for options since we're on Jira at $DAYJOB (and yeah it sucks), not that we'll ever change.

I keep hearing that Jira sucks, but I've also heard from some that it only sucks if you make it suck: that it's basically PMs adding a bunch of unnecessary steps and box-ticking and such that makes it painful to use. What would you say, having looked at multiple options?

I agree, it's complicated workflows, it's too many options/features (that we never use), it's clunky and slow and some people are even using spreadsheets for some things ;)

We were on Rally before which was okay. I've used things like Bugzilla and trac in the distant pass (for mostly solo things). Basecamp and trello a few times and even gitbug (again for a solo project).

I currently like Linear's ui/ux/approach (but I have not used it really). Shortcut and Plane.so look very similar.

Happy shortcut.com user here, used pivotal for years previously. I use it for my small engineering team.

I've previously moved from Pivotal to Shortcut (when it was still called Clubhouse) and found it to be a good alternative for our small team. I did end up having to write my own import scripts, though that only took an evening or two.

Shortcut maybe? It's definitely not the same exactly and I haven't used PL in a ton of years, but I think it works pretty well overall. The general organization is Milestones -> Epics -> Iterations -> Stories

> JIRA is obviously common but presumably would have a large learning curve

Out of the box it is quite simple. Complexity comes from companies doing a lot of customisation.

Plus it's free up to 10 users.

Yeah, I'm actually leaning toward giving it a try since we're on Bitbucket already. Might do a limited trial while we still have Pivotal access so we only have to do a full migration once.

We switched from PT to Linear and couldn't be happier.

Were you able to import your data? Directly or through another app?

I wasn't directly involved in importation, but AFAIK it went pretty smoothly: https://linear.app/docs/import-issues#pivotal-tracker

We've got a great workflow with Pivotal, and a ton of data in there, especially completed stories for reference. Seems like a price gouge for folks like us for whom switching would be painful.

Anyone have any details on enterprise pricing?

I've emailed them, but don't have a reply yet. Presumably they're a bit inundated at the moment.

Took me a few attempts writing it before I managed an appropriately civil tone. Ended up venting my frustration cryptically instead, by including a pic of the Enterprise D in the footer.

Someone should make a website that just lists basic pricing for various tiers of companies that try to hide it.

It could be a SaaS, and when you go to the pricing page it doesn’t tell you the price, but you can set up a sales call.

Please create that landing page. I'd love to see that hit the homepage here.

Enterprise pricing isn't always standardized. A lot of the time it's tailored to "what it's worth for this particular client".

Wait, you are seriously going to trust them after this rugpull?

You should be running away

We're definitely running. I already have most of our years worth of data imported into Linear. I was just curious how badly they were planning on ripping people off.

Sorry to jump to conclusions!

How did the export go?

Gotta find a new home for years of data as well.

The export was mostly painless. Linear doesn't have direct support for a migration from Pivotal, so you have to use their CLI tool for the import, which relies on their API. My initial attempt failed because they wouldn't allow more than a set number of requests per hour. An email to their support later and I was able to get this raised to accommodate the amount of data we have. I haven't dug deep, but there weren't any options presented to bring comments or attachments in, which is unfortunate as some of that historical context is important for us.

I'm also scoping out Shortcut. Shortcut's interface feels a bit more familiar when coming from Pivotal. Their import process is even less polished though. For Pivotal you have to send an email to them, they reply with a template .csv that you have to ETL your data into.

Right now the jury is still out for us.

Likely xx% of your predicted revenue.

Does anyone have the links for the "more information can be found here" and "download instructions here" bits of this?

They didn't even bother to update their website from what I can tell.

You can still download a backup of all your data (in Pivotal Tracker, click on the MORE menu, then on Export CSV).

I missed the edit window before noticing the completely fair flagging of this post, so I'm going to try again, this time, following the rules I have now read more recently and carefully. Sorry folks, second post, new norms. This is what I wish I'd posted:

I don't think their current team thinks about the product website very much. I think this has become even more true since the Broadcom acquisition, but even before that, they still had - and have! - a banner about being "here for you in these unusual times." It's from early COVID times.

As of this writing, their latest blog post is about _adding PayPal as a payment option._

It's from December, before the Broadcom deal closed. I think "add paypal" and "eliminate non-enterprise paid tiers" are different enough as product directions to illustrate the impact of Broadcom's thinking on the product.

For anyone coming to this conversation later, there's a site at talk.storytime.solutions dedicated to talking about Pivotal Tracker alternatives.

wow can't believe i'm seeing this hot garbage still exists.

I used PT for a project a few years ago and it was super underwhelming and janky. The fact that they would pull this... no surprise at all.

This has the hallmark of a Broadcom product call. Milk subs for what you can and underinvest in the products.

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