CHAPTER 1
You started on Trello or GitHub Issues.
It worked — until the team grew, the process grew, and "open / closed" stopped telling you what was actually happening.
Bugspot is built for 5–50 person software teams. Fixed schema so everyone's entries look the same. Configurable process so your workflow is still yours. Fast enough that nobody closes the tab to get work done.
It worked — until the team grew, the process grew, and "open / closed" stopped telling you what was actually happening.
It modeled everything. Then one person left, another joined, and nobody quite remembered why the workflow had thirty-seven transitions. The admin screen became a part-time job.
Fast and beautiful. But it had opinions about how software ships, and some of them weren't yours. When you needed a real QA gate or a multi-channel release, you routed around the tool to get work done.
There's a position between these three that nobody occupies cleanly. That's where Bugspot lives.
Every Entry in Bugspot has the same shape. Within that shape, you configure the part that actually differs between teams — your process. That's the line. We hold it on purpose.
No custom fields. No per-tenant schemas. No admin screen that eats your Wednesday.
Define your types, statuses, transitions, and role permissions. Structural, not scripted — so a new engineer can read your process off the wall.
A bug and a quarter-long initiative are the same kind of thing — an Entry with a type. Same comments, same links, same fields, whether you're at five points or four months.
Boards, milestones, sprints, the backlog — all are compositions of filters over the same data, not separate abstractions. Rename a status once and everything downstream stays in sync.
Four things, not fourteen. Each one named with a noun from the product.
Bugs, tasks, stories, epics, milestones — same kind of thing with a type. Comments, attachments, relationships work identically at every size.
A lens, not a boundary. Your team sees the 3 projects they care about; the team across the hall picks a different workspace over the same data.
A milestone is a forward goal. A release is a backward fact. We don't blur them. A shipped milestone becomes a release automatically.
Every list view is a saved filter. Boards, inbox, backlog, dashboards — compositions of filters, not separate abstractions. Rename once, update everywhere.
| GitHub Issues | Linear | Jira | Bugspot | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Schema | Fixed, thin | Fixed | Configurable | ✓ Fixed |
| Process | Open / closed | Fixed | Configurable | ✓ Configurable |
| Custom fields | — | — | Yes | No |
| Custom workflows | — | — | Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Speed | Fast | Fast | Slow | ✓ Fast |
| Pricing | Free | Per-seat | Per-seat | ✓ Tier-based |
| Best for | < 10 people | 10–200 if it fits | Enterprise | ✓ 5–50 dev teams |
Smaller than Jira on purpose, more opinionated than GitHub Issues, more flexible than Linear where it matters — not where it doesn't.
Bugspot charges by tier, not by user. Add a contractor, loop in a designer, invite a product person — none of it changes your bill. You pay for what your team does, not how many chairs are in the room.
See pricing →We'd rather you pick the right tool than pay us for the wrong one. Bugspot isn't a good fit if you need:
That's agency work. Try Harvest or Productive.
That's enterprise territory. Jira still wins there.
That's Notion's job. We'd rather play well with it than replace it.
That's what we're choosing not to build. Linear, Jira, or ClickUp will serve you better.
If that list sounds like you, we appreciate the visit. If none of it applies — keep reading.
Bugspot is bootstrapped and plans to stay that way. No VC. No growth-at-all-costs. No obligation to turn the product into a platform to justify a valuation. The constraint is the feature: a tracker that refuses to grow past its purpose is worth more than one that keeps adding surface area to justify its price tag.
Free to start. No credit card. No sales call. Ten minutes to set up a project and move your first entry across the board.