I remember the exact moment I realized the traditional SaaS pricing model was broken. We had just landed a new client at the agency, and we needed to bring three of their stakeholders into our project management tool to collaborate. I went to add them, and the billing page popped up. To add three temporary guests, our monthly bill was going to jump.
It felt like a penalty for doing business.
Every time we hired a summer intern, brought on a specialized freelancer, or tried to be transparent with a client, we were punished financially. Tools like Monday.com and Asana have built incredible products, but their per-seat pricing models create a massive friction point for growing teams. You end up hoarding seats, sharing logins, or keeping clients in the dark just to manage overhead.
That’s the problem I set out to solve.
The Attempted Solution: Finding a Better Way
I started looking for alternatives. I wanted something that scaled with the actual work we were doing—the projects—not the number of people touching them.
Basecamp actually gets this right. They offer a flat-rate “Pro Unlimited” plan that gives you unlimited users and unlimited projects. The catch? It costs $299 a month (billed annually) or $349 a month (billed monthly). For a large organization, that’s a steal. But for a small or mid-sized agency, it’s a steep entry point.
Other tools were either too complex (like Jira) or lacked the modern, fast user experience we needed. I looked at open-source options like Plane, which is fantastic and well-funded, but it’s built more for developer teams (like a Jira alternative) and still leans into per-seat pricing on its cloud version.
I realized there was a gap. We needed the simplicity of Basecamp, the speed of a modern local-first app like Linear, and a price point that made sense for growing agencies.
So, I decided to build it.
The Outcome: Enter ArwenHQ
I’m building ArwenHQ as an open-source, local-first project management platform. The core philosophy is simple: you get the same unlimited-user freedom as Basecamp Pro Unlimited, but at a fraction of the cost.
If you’re running 25 projects, you pay a flat rate (I’m aiming for around $49/month for the hosted version). That’s 6x cheaper than Basecamp Pro Unlimited. You can invite your entire team, all your freelancers, and every single client stakeholder without paying a dime more.
But I didn’t just want to compete on price. I wanted to compete on experience and freedom.
That’s why ArwenHQ is built with a local-first architecture. By using IndexedDB and WebSockets, the app feels instant. There are no loading spinners when you click a task or open a document. It reads from your local browser cache first and syncs in the background.
And because it’s open source (AGPL v3), you have total data sovereignty. If you want to self-host it via Docker, you can do that for free. You can audit the code, contribute to it, and never worry about vendor lock-in.
The Unfinished Reality
Building this hasn’t been easy. The local-first architecture, while incredibly fast, comes with its own set of nightmares. I’m currently wrestling with Safari’s aggressive data eviction policies and figuring out how to handle the initial sync for agencies with massive project histories without freezing the browser.
There’s also the reality of open source. I know that by releasing this under AGPL v3, people will fork it and remove any limits I try to put on the free self-hosted version. I’ve had to make peace with the fact that the free tier is a distribution mechanism, not an enforcement tool.
But that’s the journey. I’m building this in public because I know I’m not the only one looking for a better, faster, and more affordable way to manage projects.
If you’re tired of paying a penalty every time your team grows, I’d love for you to follow along.
— Arnold