Pivotal Tracker moving to paid in 6 months.
Jan 19, 2011

Dear Pivotal Tracker User,

First, thank you for using Pivotal Tracker. We couldn’t be more grateful for all of the support and feedback we’ve received from all of you.

We’re writing today to tell you that we’re introducing pricing for Tracker. All of the details, including price plans and transition information, are in this email.

Over 180,000 users have used Tracker at no charge for the last 2 ½ years. The growth in usage has been phenomenal, and we think Tracker has helped to transform how the world builds software. Our investment in conceiving, and continuously advancing Tracker to where it is today has been substantial and we’re proud of the contribution that Pivotal Labs has been able to make to the agile community.

Given the ever-increasing popularity, growing support costs, and the need for continuous product improvements, it is no longer feasible for us to offer Tracker at no charge. To ease the transition, however, Tracker will remain completely free for the next 6 months for all existing users, as well as for new users that sign up on or before February 18, 2011.

Free until July 19, 2011 (6 months from now)

We’d like to recognize all of our valued users who have been a part of our community for so long, and make sure that there is plenty of time to evaluate options and avoid disruption to current projects. We’re keeping Tracker completely free for all existing users through July 19, 2011.

In case you’ve been considering giving Tracker a try but haven’t yet, or would like to open a new account to start fresh, we’ll also keep it completely free through July 19 for all new users who sign up on or before February 19 (30 days after this announcement).

Free for public projects, non-profits, and educators

We’re making Tracker free for public projects: anyone can use Tracker for free (regardless of team size) if you keep your backlog publicly readable. If you’re an open source team, you’ve probably already been doing this anyway. Soon we’ll have a searchable directory of public projects, with a live activity feed, which we hope will get you more visibility and increase interest from potential contributors.

We also have free or discounted plans for non-profit organizations and educators at academic institutions, by request.

Pricing starts at just $7 per month

Our goal is to make Tracker affordable for everyone, from bootstrapped startups to larger development teams within established organizations. Price plans begin at just $7 per month, for teams of up to 3 collaborators. (Discounts are available for annual billing, and there is an additional Special Offer as well. See below.)

We have two plans designed for smaller teams and early stage startups:

$7 per month for up to 3 collaborators across up to 2 private projects, with 1GB of storage for file attachments
$18 per month for up to 7 collaborators, up to 4 private projects, 3GB storage, and use of the Get Satisfaction, Lighthouse, and Bugzilla integrations

SSL encryption, Campfire and Twitter notifications, as well as API use is available for all plans. Community support, via http://community.pivotaltracker.com, will continue to be open for all users.

We also have plans for larger teams, with unlimited projects, integration with JIRA and Zendesk, and priority email support. Prices for these plans are $50 per month for up to 10 collaborators, $100 per month for up to 25, and $175 per month for up to 50. Please get in touch if you have a larger group, by email to tracker@pivotallabs.com.

We also have options for on-premises installation of Tracker.

Individual use will continue to be free, with no collaborators, up to 2 private projects, and up to 200MB of storage for file attachments.

Discount for Annual Billing and Special Offer

If you’re confident that Tracker is the right tool for your team (and we hope so), you can save the price of two months of service by choosing annual billing.

We also have an additional introductory discount available: Choose a plan with annual billing on or before February 19, 2011, and receive an additional 20% discount for the first year. That’s 18 months for the price of 8.

Background on Pivotal Tracker

Pivotal Labs started to develop Tracker about 5 years ago, and we designed it to embody our practices for rapid, iterative software development. We needed a tool for our teams that was overhead- and hassle-free, encouraged communication, and automated as much project management as possible. We built Tracker for our own use but shared it with our clients and other development shops in the Ruby on Rails community.

About 2 ½ years ago, we opened up Tracker to the broader community, enabling teams around the world to take advantage of a tool proven to transform not just software projects, but entire companies.

Over this period, we’ve received a huge amount of feedback, and we’ve invested in Tracker by adding new features, providing support, and supporting unlimited use by a variety of people and organizations, including open source developers, fast growing startups, software consultancies, and large, well known organizations.

Recent Changes

Today, there are over 180,000 users, in 158 countries around the world, collaborating on over 200,000 projects. Pivotal Tracker has become an essential service for many companies, from startups to public enterprises.

To keep up with increasing growth, we’ve recently moved to a new hosting environment with dedicated hardware, expanded our dedicated Tracker development team, and invested in stronger operational capability.

We will continue to invest in scaling and infrastructure and also increase our development efforts on Tracker. We intend to keep Tracker easy to use, and strongly believe simplicity is one of Tracker’s strengths, but we do have a long list of improvements we’d like to make, including features that many of our users have been asking for. We’d like to continue the design and usability improvements we’ve recently introduced, improve and add more external integrations, make Tracker work better for larger teams and projects as well as on mobile devices, allow for more flexible workflow, and so much more.

At the end of the day, we’re establishing a paid model so that we can keep improving Pivotal Tracker aggressively based on your feedback, add operational capacity, and provide responsive support.

We look forward to continuing to serve our large community of users in the years to come. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know by emailing tracker@pivotallabs.com.