Vihar from Plane here. For the last two years, we've been on a journey building Plane, an AI-native alternative to Jira. Our goal has always been to create a project management tool that is both powerful and flexible, which is why we offer a cloud version and a self-hosted option designed to work even in air-gapped environments.
When we started, we were just trying to build a tool we wanted to use. We launched here on HN and, thanks to this community, the project took off, eventually hitting ~39.3k GitHub stars.
Along the way, we've had to face the really tough questions about how to build a sustainable business around an open-source project without compromising our principles. This post is our attempt to share what we've learned about our framework for balancing community needs with commercial realities.
We cover our biggest mistakes, the things that worked, and how we think about the future of OSS sustainability.
Happy to answer any questions you have about our journey, the tech stack, or the challenges of building in this space!