We built Bugspot for software teams of 5 to 50 people — the band where we kept being unhappy with every tracker on the market.
The space has three incumbents, and most teams end up unhappy with all of them. Jira can model anything, but the price is a tool nobody fully understands by month six. Linear is fast and opinionated, but its opinions don’t bend — teams whose process doesn’t match Linear’s get a tool that fights them. GitHub Issues is fine until you outgrow it, and you outgrow it fast.
So we built what we wanted in the middle. Opinionated where it matters. Configurable where teams genuinely differ. Built to stay that way.
The bets
A few decisions we’re not planning to revisit:
- Fixed schema, configurable process. Every Entry has the same shape — title, description, type, status, priority, severity, assignee, labels, comments, links. No custom fields, ever. The line we’re not crossing, and why.
- Configurable workflow, not workflow scripting. You define your types, your statuses, and which transitions are legal. We won’t ship conditions, validators, or post-functions. Where we draw the line.
- Atomic work, one model. Bugs, tasks, stories, and ideas share the same shape, the same comments, the same links. Milestones, releases, and roadmaps get their own home because they’re a different kind of artifact. You don’t stitch two products together to see your team’s work.
- A vocabulary that means something. Company, workspace, project, entry, milestone, release, epic, initiative — each is a precise idea, not a synonym for the others. The model is small enough that learning it pays for itself in a week.
- Speed isn’t a polish task. If a feature would make the product slower to load, slower to use, or slower to reason about, that’s a reason not to ship it — not something to optimize away later.
- Tier pricing, not per-seat. Loop in designers, contractors, the new hire. The bill stays the same. Per-seat pricing punishes the most useful thing a team can do, which is keep everyone looking at the same work.
The beta
Bugspot is in public beta. Free during the beta, paid at 1.0.
The point of an open beta isn’t free marketing; it’s that the rough edges still get sanded down by the people using the product daily. The feedback you send shapes the order things land in, and the size of the beta is the reason we can still read all of it.
If the bets above sound like a tool you’d want, give it a try. If they sound like the wrong tradeoffs, that’s useful to know too — different tools for different problems, and we’re not trying to be the one for every team.