Pivotal Tracker: Fantastic app, shame it’s free
I’ve been digging around for a decent agile PM tool for a while, and stumbled across Pivotal Tracker on Twitter a couple of days ago.
Within about thirty minutes of trying it out, I was totally hooked. We’ve rolled our own basic project management tool internally, but we’ve yet to get the time to put proper iterative development support into the app. Pivotal Tracker just works. With a clean UI and some great reporting tools, it’s all I need to run an agile project.
The one big downside is this: it’s completely free.
Wait, you say: surely that’s a good thing? Well, yes and no.
Why great software should cost money
When I pay for an app on the net, I expect a few things:
- It’s going to be up pretty much all the time.
- It’s not going to vanish tomorrow.
- It’s not going to suddenly cost a fortune.
With Pivotal Tracker, I’ve no idea when they’re going to take the software down for maintenance. I’ve seen reports of it going down without notices for 15 minutes here and there, which is fine if it’s a non-critical service. It is however most definitely not fine when my client is trying to comment on features. I also have no guarantee that it’s not going to suddenly disappear into the night, taking all my stories and possibly the project itself with it.
The other issue is that if I’m paying $20/month for it, I’ve a reasonable expectation that it’s not going to cost say $200/month next month. It’s well within Pivotal’s rights to withdraw the free service and charge what they like for the paying version, without any notice.
Are we going to use it anyway? Yes we are: it’s too good to ignore. However, we’ve put in place the following cron job to mitigate the risk:
*/20 * * * * curl -H "X-TrackerToken: " -H
"Content-type: application/xml" -X GET
https://www.pivotaltracker.com/services/v2/projects/39382/stories
> stories-backup.xml
This little piece of magic copies all our stories in XML form to our backup server every 20 minutes, so we’re not screwed if the site vanishes without notice. It would only take us about an hour to import this XML into our old system should we need to. That takes care of the main risk for me.
The conclusions: Some software shouldn’t be free. If you’re using Pivotal Tracker or any other free service in anger, make sure you’ve got a backup plan.
Another good option would be for it to go completely open source so that we could download PivotalTracker and host it ourselves. I don't think we can do that, can we?
They're reserving the right to charge for it, which is again quite reasonable. It's free, but not *that* free…
You got excellent writing skills. Awesome article. I enjoyed every word of it. Thanks:)
Hi, I have been using Pivotal Tracker for four years now, and personally I know the developers and the owner of pivotal labs. So I can tell you that they are not going anywhere for a while. I think it is free simply because they don't need the money right now, which is probably why they don't make it open source.
The Pivotal guys do sounds like a great bunch of people, but it's not really specific to them – I'd have the same feelings about any similar service. Thanks for the reassurance though.
That's the great thing about software development….someone will probably clone it, if there's not something out there already.
What 's the system can import stories?
We've rolled our own basic PM system, so we could knock an importer that could do this quite quickly.
wow. mr. paranoid.
So you'll take that free service, use it for no fee, but slam it with a full backup every twenty minutes? Thanks alot. Would you mind getting the hell off? Some of us appreciate what Pivotal Tracker is doing. They are gathering a lot of steam and a strong user base. Most great, innovative software starts free and then evolves into a revenue generating model. They are still building the foundation and not ready for thick-headed, self-important, over critical people like yourself to start demanding certain features and changes. Sure would be nice if you could reduce that backup to, say, nightly? Sure you might lose half a day, should they go down, but at least you won't be the reason they went down.
people amaze me!
I agree with you that it's a great service – so great I would prefer to pay for it than use it for free. I realise I have no right to demand anything from a free service, but to request to pay for a service I rely on in return for certain guarantees is not an unreasonable one.
I'm sure an API call every 20 minutes isn't going to stretch their system. But I take your point that that's a little too frequent. I've reduced it to every few hours.
Totally agree. Even though I'm developing desktop software, I love Pivotal Tracker as I'm trying to implement bits of Agile in my development.
The conclusion that some software shouldn't be free is something I really feel strongly about. The paradox is that I'm reluctant to pay for software myself, although I suspect that's just because I don't have any kind of income right now!
There seems to be this whole idea that because there are all these startups like Facebook, every app you use should be free. As you say, there are loads of advantages to an app costing money. I also think there's an interesting psychological reponse – an app feels different to me once I've paid for it. I'm invested in it. And that means I've got a real emotional bond with it.
And that's a great thing. Thanks for a thought provoking article.
This is the first time I see someone complaint about getting something for free.