Hi! I'm Vihar, co-founder and COO at Plane. This is my third startup - before Plane, I worked as a developer and marketer at several established organizations.
Plane is an open-core project management tool built to be simple, flexible, and extensible. We've built this over the last two years, and companies are already switching to us from JIRA and other tools. The platform runs on web, mobile, and desktop, with self-hosting options via Docker and K8s.
Check us out on GitHub: https://github.com/makeplane/plane
We're a team of 30. We're backed by OSS Capital - we raised $4M in seed funding in mid 2023.
To keep this short, I'll describe our story in four parts.
The Idea
Plane was founded by my brother Vamsi (now CEO) who initially built it as an internal tool at his consulting company. Frustrated with the complexity and high costs of existing project management tools, he built something simple - just the basics: issues with properties, kanban boards, and cycles for planning. When he showed it to clients, they asked if they could use it to manage their own projects. That's when I joined in and suggested we open-source it so other organizations could benefit.
Fun fact: Plane was originally named Vinci (after DaVinci). The current name came from writing "Plan Everything" on a board, which evolved into "Plane."
The Execution
Since the early days, both my brother and I were serious about this project. We didn't want this to be something that couldn't scale - we wanted to solve real problems in the project management space. Our research showed something interesting: people were paying $100 to $10,000 just to learn how to use existing tools. When building Plane, we decided to start from scratch with first principles thinking.
Working full-time, we saw massive growth, but we needed to make the project sustainable. That's where OSS Capital came in. We chose the open-core approach, but with a difference. While many startups claim to be open-source or open-core, they make it impossible to get started without paying. Plane is different - we have a solid Community Edition that teams of any size can use for free. Our Commercial Edition is where we monetize. There's a clean line between the two: all fundamentals stay in Community, while luxuries and enterprise features go into Commercial.
With this model, we went into back-to-back shipping mode, pushing out 20+ major releases from early 2023 to mid 2024. Now our product stands at feature parity with major competitors.
Our open-source stance: https://plane.so/open-source
The Challenges
- Early days were tough with just 5 people - managing open-source feedback, bug fixes, and feature requests was overwhelming. Users love giving feedback, but prioritizing and implementing everything with a small team was challenging. Fortunately, some of our early supporters are now full-time team members.
- Project management tools are complex verticals - there are endless features (sprints, modules, epics, APIs, bulk operations, real-time updates). Unlike many projects, we couldn't just ship basic features or copy competitors. Each feature needed careful thought about how teams actually work.
- Infrastructure costs were a major challenge. Taking inspiration from Zerodha's cost optimization, we made a tough but important decision: instead of using expensive third-party tools for campaigns, feature flagging, analytics, and billing, we built our internal tooling. While this took significant effort upfront, it's now helping us scale sustainably.
- Balancing flexibility with structure was crucial. Project management tools can be either too rigid or too loose. We spent considerable time making Plane flexible enough for different workflows while keeping it intuitive.
Next Steps
There's a lot ahead of us. Our immediate focus is going deeper into project management and expanding into work management - while this is ambitious, we've thought it through thoroughly.
Right now, we're focused on growing our community, while exploring how AI can make project management more efficient. We're working on integrating open-source AI models to help teams progress work faster and smarter. We're hiring for multiple engineering roles and always looking for contributors who are excited about the intersection of AI and project management.
I hope this post sparks discussion. I'm looking forward to connecting with fellow developers, learning about your use cases, and getting your feedback. Happy to answer questions.
Like our work? Give us a star. https://github.com/makeplane/plane
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