Show HN: Taskfort – Self-Hostable Project Management / Kanban Tool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Taskfort – Self-Hostable Project Management / Kanban Tool

taskfort.com

16 pointstim_nuwin16 comments

This will be my last submission to hackernews with Taskfort (the last submission did not receive too much attention). Taskfort is a self-hostable kanban tool with real-time collaboration courtesy of socket.io. My target audience is anyone who wants to have complete control over their data, wants to be more organized and can't rely on 3rd party web services. Licenses start at $35 / user for personal licenses. This includes a full year of support and upgrades. Once you purchase the license you will have full access to the source-code. Features on the roadmap are, making the mobile apps, and having AD + SAML integration. If you want to test out the full features before purchasing, you can create a free online account: www.taskfort.com

If you have any questions, let me know!

edit: Also as an aside, I've submitted my first application to YC. Show your support, if you want to see more applications like this in the future :)

Tim, before I decide to sign up: what's unique about taskfort.com?

The main selling point is we respect your privacy. We don't want you to be tied down to the service. It feels like a lot of self-hosted solutions are being left in the dust to these modern web-apps at the expense of getting their customer data being sold. We never want that to be the case with Taskfort. I really hope there will be more self-hosted services that can keep up with modern browser technology, I will do my part in trying to iterate as fast as I can.

Not sure hiding the source code is a good idea. Check out how Ghost did it, they have a very similar approach.

What do you mean by hiding the source code? Once you have a license, nothing in the source will be hidden.

Tim,

Some suggestions:

1. I'd take pains to break out the pricing as per year (I had assumed per month looking at your homepage)

2. The body font on the homepage is too light - hard to read

3. The "download + install" seems like you're trying to define a niche where Trello, etc. can't reach but you don't use the phrase I most closely associate with that on your homepage "on premise".

4. Would be really nice to see a demo

Hey Michael,

Thanks for the taking the time to give constructive feedback. I will try to make it more clear that the licenses are on a per-year basis, as well as visibly making the text on the homepage more clear. I have heard the term "on premise", and I agree I should use a more common phrase. I will update the language / terms later tonight. That will make it more official.

How do you think I should make it clear that you can create a free online account to test out the software yourself, or would you prefer a video?

You should make it much, much simpler to try out. Ideally hack it to where it's a single click to log in as some demo user.

Right now you're asking for 9 pieces of information before you even let people see what / how it looks.

Another thought, you could let people do a one-click deploy to Heroku from a private repo or something to make it less burdensome to roll out. This is sort of a middle step between on premise and full automated.

This is very good advice. I will work on creating a 1-click demo account. I have the developer board up for anyone to see, but having the demo account will transition users using the software faster vs creating an account. I like the heroku deploy idea. I'm actually working on setting up cloud-formation scripts so you can launch w/ Chef + EC2.

Hey Michael,

Thanks again for the advice, I have added a 1-click login to the demo account on the landing page.

I am sure this isn't intentional, but when trying to purchase a license for TaskFort, I noticed that clicking just about anywhere in the form (in the # of licenses field, next to the Purchase button, etc) caused the "Auto-Renew" checkbox to toggle on and off.

Your product looks great, but that's one hell of a way to turn people off from trusting/paying you.

My experience was on Windows 7 64-bit, Firefox 32.0.3.

Thanks for bringing that to my attention. I will address that when I get out of work. I specifically even left the auto-renew box unchecked to be respectful. I will add this to the kanban board of major things to address! My apologies:

https://www.taskfort.com/view/10 added to the backlog

Thanks for the quick acknowledgement! That board is great - it shows that you're dogfooding the product while serving as an example workflow for the those unfamiliar with kanban.

No problem anstar! I have updated the page, I was able to reproduce the issue and have moved the auto-renew box down so now it doesn't select the auto-renew when pressing down on the form.. That's the short-term fix, longer term fix I'll look into implementing later.

So if I sign up, I get the source code, then it will be me installing it from the code and I'll get support. Are the installation instructions available once you create an account?

You have to purchase a license to get the source code. But yes, there are step by step docs to install Taskfort [Right now it's only Debian instructions but in the future I'll target RHEL and other OS's].

If you want, I can install it for you later tonight when I'm free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com