I self-host OpenProject - free and a little better than Jira.
I wouldn’t use it for work but it’s good enough to track my projects, note what’s in each release, has simple user and service account key issuance for api access, user roles and access control, project level configuration for kanban lanes and status mapping, claude can access everything via the api, simple project level document library with live preview markdown editing, etc.
Have you been using Claude Code/whichever tool you use, to read and write from OpenProject directly? I do like self-hosting data like this. I used to self-host Jira back in the day.