Show HN: EnkiTask: Lightweight Project Management for Freelancers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: EnkiTask: Lightweight Project Management for Freelancers

enkitask.com

68 pointsbooper48 comments

I get the task pricing motivation: you want folk to pay for how much they use, not a flat rate, because if they are freelancing why spend a flat fee for variable use. One of the reasons I don't use Lightroom is that I only take lots of photos a few times a year, and I feel stupid paying for a month in which I don't use it.

*However*, this alternative is pretty weird. Think about it from the perspective of a software developer. Would you really want the granularity of your tickets dictated by a pricing model?

> Would you really want the granularity of your tickets dictated by a pricing model?

I think the pricing is reasonable enough for this not to happen.

On the whole it's also conflating different incentives. You don't typically associate your costs with _how_ you're using your tools, at least you don't want to. It creates a bad (or perverse) incentives to change how you work in order to minimize costs, you're rewarding your users to use your product less.

It's 1 or 2 cents per task though on all but the lowest plans.

I have seen an at least 10x variance in how people document their work in tickets. So 1 or 2 cents per "story" for some becomes 10 to 20 cents per "story" for others.

For me that just feels like a weird external factor. If it doens't bother you more power to you.

Maybe. I think the kind of people who do 20 items even when it only needs to be 2 are probably not freelancers.

I remember when I set up integration between GitHub Issues and some external ticket system, I've introduced infinite loop and issues being created on both sides. I'm glad that I didn't pay per task.

The project looks cool, but I'd strongly recommend against the per-task pricing.

This makes budgeting & forecasting difficult to impossible for a lot of teams, and creates wrong incentives. It is better to have a per user pricing, and then allow them to use as much as they want.

Threw me off at first as well. I was thinking of tasks per month. But this seems to be just pay as you go top-ups. Makes sense from a freelancer perspective. If I have work, I top-up my account. If there is none, I don't feel pressure like from all the other monthly subscriptions.

I love this pricing model as a potential customer. The cost is so little that it wouldn't be a deterrent. This is way better than another subscription.

There's a lot of problems trying to run a business with this model though IMO (forecasting, recurring expenses, etc.). I hope it works out for them though!

Seems like they are targeting the side of the market where per user pricing doesn't work.

Pay as you go is better for all but the heaviest of users. The low cost per task and topping up a balance make it one less thing to think about, one less monthly fee, and will almost certainly result in cheaper cost per month.

It's the same reason why I use api keys from all of the LLM providers rather than pay monthly fees to any one individual company. It's $5-10/mo vs. ~$80/mo.

I like the pricing - I think its interesting. But I think the author should just give the option to do one or the other. Unlimited at $10/month or per task.

Yes, that would make it ideal.

I have found Jira to be quite a useful, lightweight project management tool for freelancing - but I have three principles: 1. Design my own workflow, 2. Make the Kanban the “Workflow Board”, 3. Everyone reviews the Workflow Board, every day, and pushes their issues from left to right, through the workflow.

Each step in the workflow is the ‘kind of work’ that needs to be done on the Issue, all the way to “Release this issue into a Version”.

My clients love having the Workflow Board just up on a screen, so they can see progress as issues go from left to right. My sub-contractors like having concise work units, well described, to work on - and more to the point, have gotten ‘in the flow’ as far as pushing things from left to right. And I enjoy spending my day making sure the issues are well-described, and in the proper place in the workflow, as well as collecting data, refining issues, and generally being the grease of the wheels.

Of course, this style isn’t for everyone, or every kind of project - but I have found, if you can usefully describe the flow of work from “idea -> done” in concrete stages, and have roles and responsibilities well respected by those working on the projects (anyone can assign an issue to anyone else, or move the issue in the workflow, including backwards in the case of inappropriate completion) .. most projects can be run well with Jira, and any other project management systems which allow the description of workflow.

So, I usually sniff at any PM which claims to be a replacement for Jira, while not immediately having custom workflow -> Kanban board mapping, and an immediate interface to doing that. I find a scrolling list of issues that can only be sorted by tag to be particularly irksome.

How does EnkiTask compare in that regard, anyone know?

I must say you bought me the idea of the perfect system for the "idea -> deliverable" workflow. I'm gonna try this myself in my contracts.

Would be interested in hearing your thoughts?

"Beyond Jira", but searching for API yields no results, except for Zapier.

Jira is so much more than just the Web-UI, it has a very powerful API and it can be queried in a very flexible way.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/jql-f...

That power makes it annoying. Product Managers get their inner Stalin thrills using Jira. It’s obnoxiously complicated.

That's hardly jira's fault.

It's great piece of software. But every instance I've seen had overcomplicated setup enforced by random initiatives in the organization, while making further reasonable fixes hard by how has privileges and "we're not sure what this will break at this point".

Plus having actual admin of that stack is some magical creature that companies are afraid of.

We hate Jira but we should rather demand fixes from people enforcing how it's managed in our org.

Just a quick note to say that I find the "overscroll-behavior-x: none;" setting obnoxious, and it immediately set a resentful tone towards your website. Please don't limit how I interact with my browser.

Looks nice but why wouldn't one use Shortcut [0] instead? It's got a completely free tier.

[0] https://www.shortcut.com/

And there’s a lot of great open source alternatives you can self-host as well, e.g. https://plane.so/ or a newer https://kaneo.app/ (recently discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143097).

You could also try;

https://taiga.io/

"Taiga: The free and open-source project management tool

For cross-functional agile teams to work effectively"

Oooh, now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while! We’ve used it on a project maybe 10 years ago? Would be interesting to see how far they got since then.

I am not the target audience, but I applaud the attempt at a different pricing model. Even if it has flaws (pointed out elsewhere in this thread), I’m happy to see someone attempt something other than subscriptions.

You have several typos on your pricing page (not sure about any others, only page I looked at).

As a solo-founder I really appreciate the pricing model. Too many tools have a pricing "cliff" that makes it unusable for my needs. On top of freelancing/similar my side-business is very "bursty" which means free/low tier plans are too small for my busy weeks and the paid tiers are either too expensive to keep year-round but I'd gladly pay for my usage.

That said, my go-to project management tool has always been "whatever my current company is using". It lowers the cognitive overhead and has some nice benefits for both my day job and my side business (being more knowledgeable of the tool and how to use it).

I'm usually a bit leary when I don't see an "About" page for a company. I do see from Contacts page that you're in Australia.

I don't get this product offering these days, In about 3 hours of almost vibe coding, AI and I created a Kanban board on Toolnames, which is completely free and completely client side (using localstorage) https://toolnames.com/productivity/kanban-board

When I say almost vibe coding, I mean I was involved in the process and making manual code edits.

On your pricing tab "Expiration" is spelled incorrectly on Pro and Elite levels.

the author posted it on HN, marked their task done, and went to sleep. and we are wondering why do we need another project management tool.

Looks interesting, but do freelancers want something like Jira in the first place?

Jira is mainly used in enterprise settings and good luck convincing project managers to switch from it...

Yeah it's the bane of my existence. Such a terrible product. Really poor UI. But it gives project managers pretty pictures.

My hatred for Jira (and the wider 'agile' methodology) ensures that I'll never use something similar when I have the choice though.

>"Amazingly affordable tool." - Hacker News

ctrl-f "amazing"

>No matches

Ditto in comments for other submissions. This is the way.

AI generated testimonials. AI's constant need to create fake quotes and testimonials is one of the most annoying things when using AI to help create landing pages. I constantly am removing them.

fyi https://docs.enkitask.com/ is not loading the js bundle. i'm on my corporate laptop behind a vpn, however, so maybe my company doesn't want me being efficient and effective :)

Does this have advantages over Trello?

FYI your pricing page has typos: "Experitaion Date" / "Experitaion Date"

Seriously, i would bring any forum software and use it as a valid project management tool.

Based on some searches looks like all but one of the testimonials are fake

Who is behind this project?

What kind of question is this?

Well usually there is an about us page, or you know some kind of legal details which company I am buying from.

> Company: when this policy mentions “Company,” “we,” “us,” or “our,” it refers to Feedban, Inc., 30 N Gould St Ste R Sheridan, WY 82801 that is responsible for your information under this Terms & Conditions.

> Country: where EnkiTask.com or the owners/founders of EnkiTask.com are based, in this case is UA.

Not quite buried, but definitely could be more straightforward: https://enkitask.com/tos

Edit: Feedban seems to refer to their other product, https://feedban.com/

Just use GitHub projects instead of paying per task? WOW.

Pivotal Tracker had a nice pricing model..

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