Open Source Bug Tracking
kickstarter.com
kickstarter.com
There is a good reason why nobody has built a better bug tracker... it's nearly impossible to do so. There is an endless set of requirements that people must have before they will start to use one. You can certainly get a few smaller players to keep the lights on, but those smaller players will most likely just use Github or another site with more integration points.
You can see it in the comments already with several 'non-starter' requirements. This ends up making the project larger and more complex over time, to the point that it becomes exactly what we already have with other projects. Either that or it will just stay a small player in an already saturated area.
I wish you the best of luck with your project, I just fear that your method of using Kickstarter to try to fund it is a bad idea. $5k - fees isn't that much money. There's enough articles on HN about KS vaporware and this one is ripe for it. I think a better idea would be to spend a year working on it and then go for real funding once you have a great working prototype.
I have been thinking of writing my own version one of these days which works the way I think a bug tracker should work. For anyone who wants an idea here is how I see it working. Three columns, similar to outlook. The far left with projects/users the middle with issues and the right with details of the issue. A single search box which intelligently picks relevant issues/projects/users based on what's typed and instantly displays the results. Clicking on a project or user displays issues assigned to that user or project. Clicking on the issue displays the details on the right pane. Add drag and drop file uploads, instant comments and you have something I feel is already more productive then any bug tracker I have used.
I guess my biggest complaint is how hard it is to find bugs/issues in the system and jump between them. The above may solve that pain point. Its certainly a weekend project to implement.
But I think that the problem is not that "Some are great but expensive, others haven't changed in years, most are too complex and are re-hashes of the same product." The problem is that they have not been built for you.
This is why there are so many bug tracking, to-do list and project management solutions. Savvy people aren't satisfied with what they found because it does not fit 100% with their ideal solution so they want a custom one. So they say: "Hey look what I've build! It's so much better than the others". It's true for you and maybe for some other people but it's not true in general. It's just that everyone wants a custom bugtracking, to-do list or project management app.
I had an an old boss who did not grasp this principle and was convinced he would get rich writing a similar tool because all the other's where rubbish and not what he needed.
He even talked to several other small business owners who felt the same and thus was convinced that he would sell to them fine. He didn't realise that when he showed them the actual tool they'd want something different ...
Anyway, I left that company many years ago :-)
As well as not being built for you, it was also not built by you. I believe NIH syndrome is responsible for the glut of half-finished programmer tools that litter the SaaS market.
That's not to say that there is not room for another bug tracker, nor that there is anything wrong with a touch of NIH syndrome here and there.
ps - from what I could see, none of your videos/images/text state that you can do this. I, at least, didn't feel safe taking it for granted that such functionality exists.
Name something else which we can customise, make client facing easily, have AD authentication working against, use for documentation, source tracking, ticket mangement and infrastructure management with an administration effort of 30 minutes a month at average, that costs $0?
Trac is a framework which just happens to have ticketing, wiki and source control modules.
Redmine is a ticketing tool, wiki and source control browser which happens to have half a framework underneath it.
Its a Redmine Fork invested a lot of time into cleaning up the whole thing.
I know fogbugz+trello sortof does this, and atlassian has some similar tools.
I would've also paid $ for a kickstarter aimed at committing some usability/look-and-feel improvements to redmine.
If we reach our goal it will be pretty well featured in comparison to other ticket systems, so the design should accomodate everything we want without getting too crazy, as we sketched this all out in advance.