Why you pay $30 to move cards

Open your project management tool. What do you see? Cards moving between columns. A text field with formatting. Assignments, dates, labels. Notifications.

Now ask yourself: which part of that costs $30 per user per month?

The anatomy of a kanban

Technically, a modern project manager is:

A database. Postgres or similar. It stores tables: projects, tasks, users, comments. Cost per active user: cents.
A drag-and-drop frontend. React, a DnD library, websockets to sync. Written once, serves millions.
A login. Google OAuth. Solved, free, for a decade.
A server. A $20 VPS runs this for hundreds of small companies.

The marginal cost of adding one more user is, literally, zero. There's no factory, no stock, no shipping. It's an INSERT into a table.

So what are you paying for?

You're not paying for technology. You're paying for:

Habit. "It always cost that" is not an argument — it's an inheritance.
Lock-in. Your projects, your history, your workflows are inside. Migrating costs more than keep paying. The price doesn't reflect the software's value: it reflects the cost of leaving.
Positioning. When the first tool set $8/user and it worked, everyone copied. That's not a market price — it's a de facto cartel.
Marketing. A huge share of your subscription pays for the ads that brought you and the next customer. You pay to be sold to.

The litmus test

There's a simple way to know if a price is honest: how much does it cost to run it yourself?

An open-source project manager on a $5/month VPS serves an entire team. No user limits. Your data on your server. The gap between $5 and $30×10 users isn't engineering: it's margin.

That's why Track exists

Track is our project manager. Open source, fast, keyboard-first, with cycles and roadmaps. Self-hosted, it costs $0. If we run it for you, you pay the cloud at cost: a few dollars per team, not per user.

It's not cheaper because it's worth less. It's cheaper because we charge what it costs.

Software is dead. And so is its price.