SB-11: I Used Jira and Toggl for Twenty Years. Then I Built My Own.

Part 11 of the SaaS or Build series. Everything before this was arithmetic. This part is the receipt.

I used Jira for the better part of twenty years. Toggl and Clockify for time. I want that on the record before the story, because I am not a man who hated these tools. I was a loyal, paying, power user. I recommended them. I built my delivery operation on top of them.

And slowly, the small print started to run my operation. Jira sells annual plans in user tiers: a team of thirty pays for the fifty-seat tier, and I have stared at that invoice line and done the tier math more times than I will admit. The trackers charged per person to count the hours of people whose work I was already paying for. Every tool kept its own island of data, so the simplest question in my business, what did this client cost us against what they paid us, required exports and an afternoon.

The tools were fine. The fit was not. My firm does not run like the template, and after two decades the workaround had become the workflow: the real process lived in my head and in side documents, while the systems of record recorded an approximation of it.

What I built instead

So I built the tool my company actually needed: one multi-tenant system where projects and tasks, time, clients and communication live together, shaped exactly around how we deliver work. No per-seat meter, so a new hire is a login, not a purchase order. No tiers, so the thirtieth person costs what the third did. AI inside it, on all of the data at once, because it is one system: summaries, follow-ups, the state of every client, in our vocabulary. It is, I will admit, less polished than Jira in the corners we do not use. In the corners we live in, it is not close.

The build took weeks, not the quarters it would have taken when I started renting. That sentence is the whole series in miniature, and it is why this series exists: the economics that made renting obviously right for twenty years quietly reversed, and the invoice is the last place that tells you.

The offer, plainly

The system is multi-tenant, which means other companies can run on it in their own separate space. So here is the offer I make when I tell this story in person: if the tracker shape fits your company, write to me and I will set up a tenant for you. Use it as much as you like. No per-seat meter, because there is no meter; that is rather the point. I would rather prove this series' argument with a working system than with another thousand words.

And if a tracker is not your pain, the same logic is standing behind every example in this series. The finale is about finding the one workflow where your own version of this story starts.