I am a little frustrated about having to pay for a product in dollars. I am starting a small business and wish to use Basecamp to manage tasks around it. I also teach a niece and a nephew programming regularly, we communicate through WhatsApp and would love to switch to Basecamp for that as well. I would happily pay $30 a month, but committing to $99/month doesn't make sense for me, at least not right now when I am starting a new business and have zero income. Thinking of asking a few friends to buy a business account together and share the costs. Another such product is Roam! Ideas on how to fix it? Have you faced such issues with other products priced with only western customers in mind?

Basecamp personal doesn't work?

I think it’s a non-issue. Good products are expensive, if you don’t want to/can’t spend enough for a product or service, use a cheaper alternative until you can. For the problem at hand, basecamp 3 gives you 3 free projects (should be enough to lift-off for a small team!)

@dry-monkey-93718 I have outgrown Basecamp personal between teaching, personal projects, and work stuff. 😞 @dry-waitress-7852 I agree. But the way I am thinking about it is, why can't it be cheaper in India when that's true for so many other products/services (Spotify, Prime Video, Netflix) What gives me hope is their plans to have differential pricing for Hey. Why not increase your potential customer base by supporting differential pricing for Basecamp too?

The closest alternative I've found so far is ClickUp. It's not the same ofc, but pretty decent

True, it might help them onboard more users but also comes with additional cost and support for less income. Content or logistic platform, they benefit from local pricing, Not sure about SaaS solutions. I’ve been a basecamp user for very long and I think of Basecamp as a company which will avoid scale in favour of seamlessness with it’s users and operations.

@curved-minister-23111 Support FOSS products. Pay regional vendors to support it for you.

@curved-minister-23111 Team up with a friend you trust. Use basic project management features for separation and trust each other's integrity to not look into each other's business

@victorious-energy-56764 https://erpnext.com/open-source-project-management-software

Yup. And the drive has to be strong because it comes at the cost of time spent. When you agree to use FOSS, you are essentially saying -- I will use this free software and in exchange for it being free, I will spend my time on the tool. This is the problem business tools solve -- Basecamp says, don't worry about managing all that, we will do it, you pay the money. You get to spend considerably less time. FOSS tools are always a balance between spending time and spending money. I hope we fix it one day. That business-funding approach you presented at the Ruby meetup is one of the good ideas.

Thanks for the inputs guys! I shall update on the progress. 🙏🏽

I agree with @acceptable-flag-71699's hosted FOSS approach. 👍

I asked Basecamp about this months ago but looks like they won’t have a plan for smaller teams or third-world countries. For project organization, I have been liking Clubhouse so far.

I am leaning more towards the approach @victorious-energy-56764 suggested.

Team up with a friend you trust.

I ❤️ Clubhouse. Best project management software, IMO.

Thoughts from people who have used both Basecamp and Clubhouse?

That's a Mountains vs Beaches question 🙂

Okay, I will stop. 🙂

Zerodha runs entirely on hosted open-source software. They have cited this as a their core advantage over competitors because it allowed them to move fast in response changing regulations.

It's easier to customize foss tools as well in case you have to

Can I bug you both on DM or a separate thread?

yes

Sure

Totally agree on use of FOSS to keeps costs down, @acceptable-flag-71699. The biggest benefit for me is no vendor lockdown and multiple service providers to choose from in the case of popular projects. Erpnext has been a pain to setup, but now that we have it working, there are just infinite possibilities and we plan to move over accounting functions currently being handled proprietary software over to erpnext.

Basecamp offers personal plan with 3 projects. If its not enough you can always create a new alternate account (Just saying!). As far as Roam there are free alternatives like Obsidian and Remnote (both are equally functional w.r.t Roam Research)