Gigantt is Shutting Down

Dear users of Gigantt,

It is with a heavy heart that I am announcing today that Gigantt is shutting down. Starting from today, new users can no longer sign-up for Gigantt. Existing users, please don't worry, your data is safe and you may export it in a variety of formats. I highly recommend you do that as soon as possible.

I understand these news may raise some questions, so here is my attempt to answer some of them in advance. If your question isn't answered below, feel free to contact me at gigantt@assaflavie.com.

Q: What's going to happen to my work-plans?
A: My intention is to keep the system online for as long as possible, so you could export your plans and migrate to another project-management system. Starting from July 2014 you will have read-only to your existing plans, and you will not be able to make changes to them any more. I encourage you to export your plans sooner rather than later, because from this point on bugs will no longer be fixed and the system will run in a reduced-redundancy mode, which means it might experience periods of unplanned nonavailability. Keeping the system running has a cost and at a certain point it will have to be turned off for good.

Q: How can I export my work-plans?
A: This page explains it all. Open your plan, go to the menu -> plan -> export. There's no option to batch export multiple plans at the same time, so you would have to do this one by one if you use more than one plan.

Q: Is it possible to run Gigantt locally on my own server?
A: Not as is, no. Gigantt was designed to run in the cloud on multiple servers with various roles. Porting Gigantt to an on-premise installation is possible, but requires more work than I can afford to do at this point.

Q: Why are you shutting down??? Gigantt is awesome!
A: Well, thank you, I agree. :) All kidding aside, I am proud of Gigantt. It was an ambitious undertaking - trying to offer the world a new way to manage projects, one that's both fast and easy to learn but also gives you realistic time-estimates for large, complex projects. The bottom line is that not enough people saw the value in that idea, and it eventually became economically unfeasible to continue developing and supporting Gigantt. Naturally, we have put a lot of thought into analyzing this failure, and the full answer to why Gigantt never took off is rather complex. It's not just one thing and to explain all the reasons why it turned out the way it did is a story much longer than can fit in this post.

Q: Will you release Gigantt as open-source?
A: A lot of time and money went into developing Gigantt, and while I cannot afford to continue developing it at this time, I really do wish to get back to it some day. Some great technology has been developed as part of this project, technology that may end up in future commercial endeavors that are proprietary in nature. So the answer, I'm afraid, is no.

Finally, I would like to thank everyone that was involved in Gigantt.
First, our loyal users, some of whom have been using Gigantt for years now, and have been sending us great, encouraging feedback.
To everyone that was part of the Gigantt team over the years, thank you for taking part in this adventure. You've done a great job on a heck a product. Even great products can fail commercially, and this one certainly did not fail because of its quality. I hope that everyone involved has benefited and grown as part of this journey.
To our investors, thank you for believing in us and taking a risk on a first-time entrepreneur. There are a lot of things I could have done better, but picking investors is not one of them. You've been supportive all the way, and I hope to share success with you in the future.

Yours truly,
Assaf Lavie
Founder, Gigantt

Pricing for Piracy

A post on my personal blog about why so many feel okay about downloading pirated content and what we can do about it: Pricing for Piracy.