The project
Debt.com was paying $2,500 a month for Jira. I built them something better. Pulse is a fully customized project management system built on Plane, an open-source PM platform, and deployed internally on Railway. It handles everything across the company: kanban boards, time tracking, timesheets, reporting by person or project, and a dashboard every team member actually uses. The customization work covered UI, workflows, naming conventions, project structure, and the time-reporting layer that makes it genuinely useful for a creative and marketing organization.
The challenge
Debt.com was paying $2,500 a month for Jira, for a tool the team did not even like. The brief was blunt: something better, that the company owns, for a fraction of the cost, and good enough that people stop dreading it.
The approach
Build on Plane, an open-source PM platform, and deploy it in-house on Railway. Then do the part that actually makes it work: customize the workspace, workflows, and naming for how a creative and marketing org really operates, and build the time-reporting layer that makes it worth logging into.
What I built
- Configured and deployed a full Plane instance on Railway, zero subscription, full control
- Customized the workspace across 5 departments: Ops, Dev, Paid Marketing, Content, Design
- Built kanban workflows with custom statuses tailored to creative review cycles
- Timesheet view for weekly hour logging across all work items and projects
- Time Reports dashboard, filterable by person, business unit, project, and date range, with CSV export
- Eliminated $2,500 a month in Jira licensing ($30K a year) with a tool the team actually prefers
Results
