I built this a few weeks ago because I missed the simplicity of Pivotal Tracker when it came to managing projects and since then it's grown substantially to a few hundred users. More interesting is that there are a few thousand stories that have been shipped but they are mostly (~80%) done by agents. I went with the "bring your own agent" model to let users figure out what their agents should have access to and focused instead on letting them work and collaborate on tickets, communicating with each other through comments. There are plugins for Claude Code and Codex, and I'll have some upcoming integrations for Hermes and OpenClaw as well.
I decided for now to go with hosting projects for free because I'm using it for several projects that more than pay the hosting costs and the BYOA model makes it cost effective to run the service. In the future I may open source it or offer a hosted option, but more interested in seeing what use cases other people come up with and request right now.
Most informed analysts say Russia has the opposite problem. They don't have any more meat for the grinder without tapping the middle and upper class of Russian citizens, which will have repercussions, potentially serious ones, for Putin.
This is a pretty clear summary of a real problem in most work environments. I have some thoughts about why, but I'm holding onto your articulation to ruminate on in the future.
Do you have examples of companies in this space that actually reached break-even? Heroku never hit profitability as far as I remember and with the Salesforce acquisition the question of profitability is moot. AWS is a counter-example to using a free tier as a GTM strategy. AWS did not start with a free-tier offering for S3 or EC2, that only came years later. By then they already had significant traction in the market.
I wish I shared your enthusiasm for where Heroku could go but I have a few friends at Salesforce I've asked about how they see Heroku internally and it really doesn't seem like it is going to get much love. Hope to be wrong though.
This is likely the biggest culprit for a lot of these companies. Too many of us have grown up in the culture of getting hosting and platform for "free", but at some point the companies providing it still have to pay the bills. There has to be a better pricing model that let's someone deploy their relatively small, low-traffic app for $10s/month or even $200 - $300 / year for the basics (e.g. - Heroku free tier type capabilities). It's not going to save these companies but it would limit excessive growth of their own costs from a free tier while at the same time still being affordable for 1 - 2 person teams who are trying to get something in front of users.
One technique I've used for 8+ years now is an in-person programming problem. The general guidelines are:
1. It is a problem representative of the work the person will normally do in the job (we use an extract of our actual data for it)
2. We provide clear guidelines and criteria for success.
3. They are allowed to implement a solution in any language they choose, using any tools they choose (we ask everyone to bring a laptop with their preferred dev environment, but we do provide one with some common tools for them if they can't).
4. They are allowed to use Google and open-source libraries to help them with the solution (we want to see how they really solve a problem)
5. We are there to interact with them and answer domain specific questions, as well as to offer advice if they are stumbling on something to help them move forward.
I've really, really gotten a lot of good mileage out of this. The range of skills that I've encountered over the years has really surprised me. The problem is pretty straight-forward, and usually involves parsing some JSON, looking at the data, and matching disparate sets of the data together. The basic O(n^2) solution can be done in about 20 lines of code and there is some nuance to the datasets that require them to think through the problem and not what they have memorized in their head. I've had programmers with years of experience from places like LinkedIn take 20 minutes just trying to read a file in from the file system, and I've had people who are self-taught developers crank through a really good solution in the same time. I like being able to see how people are writing code, how quickly they are able to lookup information they might need, and listen to the types of questions they have when trying to solve the problem.
It does scare me when experienced developers can't write FizzBuzz though, in any language of their choosing, in a reasonable time frame. The thing I tell myself is that there are so many "gotcha" style programming interview questions that people might just be nervous that there's some trap waiting for them in the question.
A few years ago I instituted an "interviewing code of conduct" for my teams with a few tenants that we've refined over the years, but the first one was "We will treat every candidate with respect and empathy in our interview process". The team has adopted some attitudes and techniques to do so while also not compromising on the talent or skills we are looking for. We've gotten very positive feedback on our interviews, so we think it's working.
I decided for now to go with hosting projects for free because I'm using it for several projects that more than pay the hosting costs and the BYOA model makes it cost effective to run the service. In the future I may open source it or offer a hosted option, but more interested in seeing what use cases other people come up with and request right now.