Show HN: Simple Alternative to Complex Project Management for Freelancers

I trust your product is as good as you say it is but I'm looking at the website trying to suss out why.

I'd love it if you could just tell me exactly what sets it apart. A lot of the language reads as abstract marketing fluff like boosting my productivity and the like.

Maybe you could tell me what is bad about trello, asana, jira etc that you sought to fix with your product?

I would also ditch the ai image at the top. It kind of sends the message you phoned it in when making the website. You'd be better off just showing the product itself right from the start.

Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply! Honestly, I’d rather not get into a long debate about what’s wrong with project management tools today—it’s a big list! But if you’re interested in diving deeper, feel free to reach out on Twitter: @booperdev, and I’d love to chat about it.

As for why EnkiTask is different, I think the best way to find out is to give it a try. If you like it, I’ll be thrilled! If not, that’s totally okay too. :)

And regarding the hero image—yep, I messed up on that one! I’ll get it swapped out today. Thanks for pointing it out!

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Best of luck on your product launch.

Not to take anything away from the launch of this offering, but I tend to find that project management for freelance work and any self managed project (whether as a solo dev or within a small group) that is intended to generate income requires a little more than just managing tasks/activities. Managing costs, availability, etc tend to be important as well.

For freelance and small contracting work, and then lately for my own side projects and such, I've been running a self hosted instance of OpenProject. It has 2 features that I find are extremely valuable: 1. resource and materials costs 2. Gantt charts

Having costing available is extremely useful for paid gigs: not only for budgeting purposes, but also indirectly in keeping scope creep to a minimum (or alternatively, being able to indicate how much the additional effort is actually going to cost based on task estimates, and having informed conversations with the client if needed).

And gantt charts seem to not be used as much these days, but its really helpful in getting a quick overview of how changes to a projects tasks (new tasks added, delays, resource planning constraints, etc) affect the project timeline.

For the most part, I tend to find that increasingly, "project management" tools are more actually "task management" tools. Which have their uses. But for project management, there's more to a project than just its tasks.

You’re absolutely right—EnkiTask isn’t a full project management tool, it's more of a Task Management tool, and in the first version of the landing page, I positioned it that way. However, some friends in marketing suggested that if EnkiTask evolves into a more comprehensive project management system in the future, it would be tough and costly to change the positioning later. So, I decided to position it as a project management tool from the start, even though I know it’s not there yet.

Regarding Gantt charts and budgeting, I intentionally chose not to integrate those features because I wanted to keep things simple and affordable. There are already plenty of great tools for managing budgets and finances. Instead of building those features from scratch, I’d rather focus on creating a lot of integrations with existing tools to provide users with flexibility. That said, I’m planning to launch a Feature Suggestion page soon where users can propose and vote on features they’d like to see added. If those features gain enough support, we’ll definitely consider adding them! :)

Congrats on shipping. And double congrats on coming up with a pricing model that is a bit different from the normal SaaS monthly fee type arrangement

Thank you! I'm just tired of all the recurring payments and wanted to try something new.

Congrats on shipping! Not gonna lie, the AI generated images of people on your landing page give me the creeps. Especially the very first one.

Your comment made me go look, and yeah that is some uncanny valley right there. Which is surprising, I'm sure I could get vastly better results just by fiddling with Midjourney for five minutes.

Thank you! Yeah, I already understand that the images are creepy :) I'm already working on changing those AI-generated images. Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I love them!

not to be cynical but yet nother Scrum-based project management tool that promises the moon but delivers a watered-down version of Asana/Trello. 'Unlimited team members' is just a marketing gimmick - what about data storage limits? How does this tool handle large-scale projects with multiple stakeholders? And what about integrations with other tools? The 'AI-generated changelogs' feature sounds like a nice-to-have, but how does it actually work in practice?

I'd love to see some real-world examples of how EnkiTask has helped teams achieve their goals, rather than just a laundry list of features. And can we get some transparency on pricing? 'Pay-for-task packages' sounds like a great idea, but how much does each task cost, and what's the minimum commitment?

Overall, EnkiTask feels like a me-too product that's trying to ride the coattails of more established players in the project management space. I'd need to see some serious proof of concept before I'd consider using this tool for my team.

Hey, maybe you checked out a different EnkiTask! I never promised the moon or anything like that—I’ve been clear from the start that this is a simple task management tool. Nothing more, nothing less. As for unlimited team members, it’s not just a gimmick. You can invite or remove as many people as you want, and you won’t have to pay for it. Feel free to try it out! And no need to worry about data storage—we’ve got that covered for what this tool is built for.

To be completely honest, this tool isn't designed for large-scale projects with multiple stakeholders, and I’ve mentioned that it's focused on solopreneurs, freelancers, indie makers, and small teams. We’re still in the early public stages, and our main goal is simplicity for these types of users.

Regarding integrations, we’re actively working on them. Expect to see a lot coming soon in the form of Add-ons—stay tuned! This is just our base version, and there’s a lot of work ahead. If people like it and the demand grows, we’ll invest more resources to develop and evolve EnkiTask.

As for the AI-generated changelogs, I’ll add more detailed explanations and examples in the documentation soon. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll definitely add some use cases to the landing page to show how EnkiTask is helping teams achieve their goals in real-world scenarios.

Regarding pricing, feel free to check out our pricing page here: https://enkitask.com/prices. As you'll see, tasks start from $0.05 and go as low as $0.01—the more you buy, the less each task costs. There's absolutely no commitment—you can buy as many tasks as you need and use them whenever you want.

You're absolutely right! One of the main reasons we built EnkiTask is because we can . I don't have any flashy proof or guarantees – we've spent over a year building it for our own internal use, and it works really well for us. The best proof I can offer is for you to try it out yourself. If you like it, that’s awesome! If not, no hard feelings.

I guess I'm unusual -- the AI-generated images stand out to me as what they are, but they don't upset me or give me a negative impression of the product.

Since the pricing model is so uncommon, it would be good to get more clarity on how that works in practice. For example, if I work at a company with 25 devs with about 100 tasks going into each two-week sprint, does the pricing mean I need to spend maybe $6 per month to buy 250 tasks? That seems unsustainably affordable.

I would understand that the tasks package is per user and each user would use up their tasks at an individual pace.

No, tasks are deducted from the project owner's account. For the rest of the users, the system is free. If someone on the team creates a task, it will be charged from the project owner's task account.

like AI images too! :) But no worries, if people don’t want them, I’m happy to remove them. :) And yes, the pricing works exactly like you understand! It’s real! This is unsustainably affordable, haha. Welcome aboard!

Wonder how many parts of the product are also ai generated and - as the front pic - somehow "creepy".

Yes, the image is kinda creepy! Already working on changing it! What do you mean by AI-generated parts of the product?

Looks interesting. As a consultant I hate Project and Atlassian. But please get rid of that creepy AI created image at the top. Is she showing me a new product or getting ready to eat my soul through my eyes?

Removed. "eat my soul through my eyes" - good words for a country song :)

Looks cool, congrats on the launch.

p.s. scrollbars in the column view on the each column are a bit distracting

Thank you!!! Regarding the scrollbars – I’ll check! We’ve fought a lot with them. :)

The first image on the marketing page is an AI-generated picture of a person staring back. At best it's unsettling, and at worst it makes me wonder how authentic of a user experience the app can offer. Above-the-fold, first landing page content is valuable real estate. Ethically/copyright-ambiguous, inauthentic marketing is a strange thing to value imo.

> At best it's unsettling

To say the least... This one looks like something out of a horror movie.

We've had models that can generate realistic looking people and coherent text for a while now, if they're going to insist on using an AI generated image (for some reason) at least make it a good one. Or better yet just mock up a product image that shows off what you're actually selling.

I hate to be too critical, but I think obvious AI-generated images gives a lot of people the 'ick'. It was cool and avant-garde for a while, but now it unfortuantely gives off a bad impression.

This is hyper-subjective; I myself am zero percent bothered by them.

Yeah, I would get a shutterstock image, not perfect but much better than AI images.

Thanks for the feedback! You're not the only one who’s mentioned the AI image—it seems to be a bit polarizing. I’ll definitely be removing it. As for the marketing copy, I’m no expert in copywriting and have done my best for now. I might bring in a professional later to polish things up. I really appreciate your input!

There should be a transition period from flat humans to ai generated intense humans. I don't know, maybe real humans?

strongly agree