If software costs less to make, it should cost less to use.

Writing software is getting cheaper every month. Recently, a small team released open-source rebuilds of much of Adobe's creative suite. If software costs less to make, it should cost less to use.

Glasstrack is my attempt at that. It's an issue tracker for teams, in the spirit of Linear, Jira and Trello. It's open source under the MIT licence, so it's free: download it, run it, change it.

If you'd rather not run it yourself, I'll host it for you. Hosting costs real money, so hosted Glasstrack is pay-as-you-go, at cost. Each workspace pays a share of the servers, capped at $5 a month, plus its own storage and email, plus 20% to cover payment fees and a small reserve. Most teams pay about $6 a month; the same 20-person team pays $200 on Linear. Every new workspace starts with $10 of credit, and the calculator shows exactly where every cent goes.

I'm self-funding Glasstrack to start, and the finances page shows exactly how much of the server bill I'm covering. Most of what it costs to run software is fixed: the servers cost much the same whether 10 teams use them or 500. So every new team lowers the cost for everyone, and once there's three months of running costs in reserve, I lower the cap as well. The price only goes down, and I'll keep finding ways to run it more cheaply and pass every saving on.

How can it be this cheap? AI now does much of the work that used to need a whole team. It already helps me build and fix Glasstrack, and I'm setting it up to triage bug reports and ship fixes around the clock. Instead of turning those savings into profit, Glasstrack passes them on to you. I'm still here: I set the direction, I'm accountable for what ships, and you can always reach me.

Issue tracking is the first tool. If this works, I'd like to do the same for others.