(Which isn't to say it necessarily should be cheaper, only that it seems surprising to see that price without any attempt to compare or justify why you believe that e.g. it's already, at launch, worth 3x as much as Pivotal Tracker).
I'm not saying that it will, I haven't tried it so I have no idea. I'm just surprised that people really want to shave less than $100 off of the tools they provide their team.
But all marketing statements are rarely taken at face value. With self-service free trials, products can be compared and contrasted.
One tool will work better for a given workflow than others. And it's a no-brainer to pay an additional e.g. $70/m to buy the best tool for the job.
The problem is businesses don't just buy 1 tool for their team, they probably buy dozens, and if each one costs and additional $90 per team of ten that adds up quickly. Save money where you can especially when the results are the same.
Of course, if the results are the same, you should decide on price.
But software isn't a commodity product. Each one has strengths and weaknesses. I'm just surprised at the amount of price sensitivity considering a difference of 30 seconds a day between one tool and the other more than makes up for the price difference.
Or: what makes premium oil worth the extra money, compared to regular?
If the creators of Matterhorn can continue to shelve egos, keep effecting some humble sincerity and focus on why their tool is better, we may find it's an exception to that rule.
Edit: clarified that the devs are already showing low-ego and sincerity - I realized my wording didn't suggest that earlier.
pm software is not the same between brands either. each one I've used offers a different user experience and each tends to excel in their own way.
software, in general, is also not the same between brands, as you state. yahoo search is different than bing is different from Google.
As a former mechanic I would like to point out a flaw in your way of thinking about engine oil as a commodity similar across the board.
Regular engine oils vary in overall quality not due to the oil itself being of substantially better or worse quality itself, but because of the different combinations of surfactants and detergents that the varying brands use, and molecular uniformity allowing tighter tolerances in the engineered part using the oil in question.
The more expensive the motor oil, the less it chemically looks like crude oil until you get to the most expensive types of oils (synthetics), which aren't crude based at all but synthesized using the Fischer-Tropsch process.
Precision engineered parts require synthetic oils. It's akin to placing your smartphone face down on an asphalt sidewalk. At high speeds and temperatures the contaminants in a lower grade oil will destroy the car that calls for the 50 dollar oil cans, and it'd be ill advised to ignore the need for it.
It's more like paying a construction worker $100 an hour and then giving him a hammer that costs $5 instead of $10, but only drives nails at half the speed because it's too light.
I suspect this is why JIRA has very different pricing for <=10 and >10 users.
so this just further proves your point that some large corporations are less price sensitive than others.
Your pricing is also too high for a large org, especially when one could use something like Phabricator for free. This doesn't even get into MS Project or document management (MS Office? Google Drive?).
Long story short, this looks like a good start and may work well for SMBs, but definitely not a big company.
Also as an aside, in most large companies, PPM is handled 100% separately, and by different people, than actual product management and dev planning/resource allocation/bug fixing/testing/support/etc.
How do you know? I made the contrary experience
It would be nice to track feature requests against customer application engagement as well as uptake by said customer. Attempting to make everyone happy leads to MS like products.
Open Source full featured ALM, self-hosted or SaaS[2] consistent & easy to go upgrades.
(Disclosure: I'm part of the dev team)
It took a few weeks to get a suitable workflow set up, and in spite of my gripes it's one of the best issue trackers around. I miss working with it on other projects.
What I really want is a fast and lightweight Jira.
If there should be one place in the world where JIRA runs quickly, it should be on Atlassian's own hosting platform, yet I continue to be amazed at how slow it can be.
So they're clunky and slow on any other continent. Including, amusingly, Atlassian's engineering HQ in Sydney.
The config my company is using makes it somewhat more pleasant than stock bugzilla or trac (though not nearly as convenient as github issues was).
The amount of crap you can turn on if you like can make the interface completely unusable, of course. But that's true in anything with a lot of configurability. It's the cost of being able to build your own process onto the tool.
First world problems indeed.
We also use Confluence which also seems to do it's job properly as a wiki.
I'm personally considering using Jira for my own projects in the future.
JIRA is a total nightmare to configure sensibly, and the UX is complex enough that there's a real learning curve to get your team using it effectively.
The kicker is, that once the combination of JIRA, JIRA Agile, and Confluence are setup correctly, and your team is using them well, there's nothing else like it. It's spectacular for:
- tying specs to issues to code
- surfacing status to non-devs sensibly
- allowing interested folk to keep abreast of projects without having to attend meetings
- getting rid of huge messy email conversations
- figuring out "why the hell did we do that?!"
I'd recommend JIRA + JIRA Agile + Confluence to any team with more than 10 members, with the caveat that you need to find/hire an expert to configure the product and help your team use it effectively.
ninja edit: JIRA will allow you to faithfully model+enforce your fucked-up development process. So, badly-configured JIRA can be one of the least fun experiences of your working life.
Please help - where can I learn to configure our setup correctly? I think our Agile is pretty ok but the integration with Confluence is almost zero. Where do I find an expert to help with the setup?
So if a successful & profitable software company is about to hire you but you would decline the offer just because She is using JIRA.
Apparently this also says how hard it is to manage people rather than dealing with just code and tricking the compiler.
Like anything else, there are things we've chosen not to implement in a V1 release, that we will add in later releases. We focused on differentiating ourselves in the market, not just doing a better job of what Jira does.
So, there is hope. :) It's 'real'. It's awesome. And it's just a few months from Release.
Cheers
Way better to charge and learn about what paying customers want, rather than make it cheap and hope to eventually convert them.
Maybe he's not trying to make a billion dollars and instead is planning on making a great product.
If you want outrageous pricing have a go at Slack!
I'm working hard enough for our company to pay $2 per user for HipChat.
$9 per user is very expensive when it comes to these services at scale. I can see this on a team of 10-15 people, but certainly not on a company wide basis.