Why I built WannaTrack

I want to tell you the exact moment WannaTrack started, because it wasn't a strategy session or a market analysis. It was a bill.

We were a small team, heads down, actually enjoying the work. We used Jira because that's what you use. Then our eleventh person joined, and the free plan ended. Ten seats free, and the moment the eleventh hand went up, the price was seven dollars per seat, per month, for all of us. Seventy-seven dollars a month to keep doing the thing we were already doing.

Maybe that's nothing to you. To me, at that point, it was real money I did not have. I sat there staring at the upgrade screen feeling something I think a lot of small teams feel and rarely say out loud: punished for growing.

It wasn't just the price

If Jira had been a joy to use, I might have found the money. But it wasn't. It was slow. It was heavy. Every screen had ten things on it and I used two of them. Moving a ticket sometimes felt like filing paperwork. We were paying more and more for complexity that actively got in our way, features I would never touch, configuration I never asked for.

That's the part that stuck with me. Not "this is expensive," but "this is expensive and it's making my team slower." Those two things should not go together.

So I built the thing I wanted

I'm an engineer. When something annoys me enough, I build my way out of it. I wanted an issue tracker that did the handful of things a software team actually needs, the board, the backlog, the sprint, the burndown, and then got out of the way. Fast. Simple on purpose. Nothing you have to grow into, nothing you're quietly paying for.

That principle still runs the whole product. Every feature is on every plan, including the free one. There are no paywalls hiding the useful stuff behind an upgrade. The board loads instantly because a tool that makes you wait is a tool that's wasting your day.

Money should be respected, not extracted

I kept the free tier at ten users on purpose, because that's the size where I first felt the squeeze, and I wanted teams that size to just get to work. When you outgrow it, you pay for what you actually use and nothing else. I am not interested in surprising you with a bill. I have been on the other side of that screen.

I don't think that makes WannaTrack special because of some clever pricing trick. I think it makes it honest. I built it for people like me: small teams who work hard for their money and want a tracker that respects both their time and their budget.

Where we are now

WannaTrack is live, it imports from Jira so you don't lose your history, and you can try the whole thing in the live demo without signing up for anything.

If you have ever stared at an upgrade screen and felt that same quiet frustration, I built this for you. I'd genuinely love to know what you think.