The Problem With Jira When You're Small
Jira is not a bad product. It's an incredibly powerful product — for the teams it was designed for. Large engineering organisations with dedicated scrum masters, project managers, and enough complexity that you actually need Jira's depth to manage it.
We are not that team.
We're 12 developers. We run two-week sprints. We do sprint planning, daily standups, and retrospectives. That's the full extent of our process. Clean, simple, and it works.
But Jira doesn't price or behave like a tool for a 12-person team. It prices like an enterprise tool that tolerates small teams.
Every time we brought on a new developer, the bill went up. Not a little — enough that it became a conversation. "Do we really need Jira for this?" We'd push the question aside, go back to work, and the invoice would arrive again next month.
The frustration wasn't one dramatic moment. It was 12 monthly invoices, each one making me feel like we were paying enterprise rates for a tool we were using at 20% of its capacity.
At some point I sat down and did the math. What we actually used Jira for: creating tasks, running sprints, tracking what was done and what wasn't. That's it. We were paying for the rest of it and touching none of it.
What We Tried Before Building Anything
Before writing a line of code, we tried the obvious alternatives.
Linear — genuinely better UX than Jira. Faster, cleaner, clearly built by people who care about design. But at $8 per user per month, the per-seat model was the same problem with a nicer interface. And it still had more structure than a 12-person studio actually needs day to day.
Trello — we used it for a while. Too loose. No real sprint structure. Great for kanban, not built for teams that run sprints and want to hold themselves accountable to a two-week commitment.
Notion — we use Notion for documentation and it's excellent at that. As a sprint planning tool it requires too much setup and maintenance. You end up building your own system inside Notion and maintaining that system forever.
Nothing was quite right. Everything was either too heavy or too loose.
So we built Spryn.
What We Actually Needed — A Short List
Before writing any code, we wrote down what the ideal tool would actually do. The list was short.
Sprint planning that takes 20 minutes, not 2 hours. A board that developers open every morning without being reminded. Setup that takes an afternoon, not a week. Pricing that doesn't punish you for growing your team. And nothing — absolutely nothing — that we didn't need.
That was the entire brief. We kept it on the wall while we built.
So We Built It
It took us several months to build the first version that we were happy enough to switch our own team to. We were building it alongside client work, so it wasn't a full-time effort — but we were disciplined about it.
The day we moved our entire studio off Jira and onto Spryn was a real moment for me. Twelve developers, live sprints, real work. If this broke, we'd feel it immediately.
It didn't break.
The first two months of using Spryn for our own work taught us more than the entire build phase. We found things that needed fixing. We found things that worked better than we expected. We removed features that felt necessary in planning but turned out to be noise in practice.
The moment that told me we'd actually built something real: our scrum master — who had been the most vocal Jira defender on the team, the person who knew every Jira shortcut and had built our entire workflow inside it — came to me after six weeks and said it was genuinely better for how we work.
That was the validation I needed. Not from a beta user. From the person on our own team who had the most to lose if Spryn wasn't good enough.
Spryn vs Jira — The Honest Comparison
I'll be direct here because I think dishonest comparisons are a waste of everyone's time.
A few of these deserve more than a table cell.
Setup time: Jira's setup is a project in itself. Configuring workflows, permission schemes, issue types, custom fields — it's genuinely powerful when you need all of that. When you don't, it's a week of configuration before you've tracked a single task. Spryn has opinionated defaults. You connect your team, create a project, and you're planning your first sprint the same afternoon.
Sprint planning: Jira's sprint planning is capable of handling enormous complexity. That's also what makes it slow for small teams. Spryn's planning is opinionated — it nudges you toward decisions rather than giving you infinite options. For a 12-person team that wants to plan a sprint in 20 minutes and get back to building, that's the right call.
Pricing: This is the core issue for small teams. Jira's per-seat model means every new hire is a line item on your invoice. At 12 people you feel it. At 15 you're having budget conversations about a project management tool. Spryn has a flat $100/month plan for teams up to 20 people. One bill. No counting heads. No invoice spike when you make a hire.
Who Spryn Is Right For — And Who It Isn't
Being specific here matters.
Spryn is right for dev teams of 4–20 people. Teams currently on Jira who feel like they're using 20% of what they're paying for. Teams on Trello or Notion who've outgrown basic task management and want real sprint structure. Founders and CTOs who want the team running sprints without the overhead of managing the tool.
Spryn is not right for teams of 50+ who need enterprise compliance features. Teams deeply embedded in the Atlassian ecosystem who rely on Jira's integrations. Teams who need Jira's advanced reporting and audit capabilities.
If you're in the second group — stay on Jira. It's the right tool for you.
If you're in the first group — we built Spryn for you.
Try It
Spryn is live at spryn.io. Free for teams up to 3 members, no credit card needed. Pro is $6 per user per month. The flat team plan is $100 per month for up to 20 seats — one bill, done.
Setup takes 20 minutes. We know because we timed it.
We've been running our own 12-person studio on it for 2 months. It replaced Jira for us completely. If you're frustrated with what you're currently paying for and using a fraction of — give it a try.
And if it's not right for you, I'd genuinely like to know why. You can reach me directly at abhinav@froiden.com.
— Abhinav, Co-founder, Froiden