Lightweight PM for teams priced out of full feature sets

The complaint 'we wish some of the advanced features were available to just a few users' points to a specific structural problem in how PM software is priced: vendors price by seat at a single tier, which means a team of 20 where only 3 people need advanced capabilities still pays the advanced rate for all 20 — or settles for the base tier that's missing things the 3 power users actually need.

This pricing structure isn't an accident. Vendors selling upmarket need the per-seat revenue to justify enterprise positioning, so they bundle advanced features into tiers rather than offering true role-based access at the capability level. The people who feel the pain most acutely are team leads at small-to-mid companies who can't justify a full upgrade for the whole organization just to unlock one feature for a subset of users.

What gets missed by the market is a PM workflow layer designed explicitly for mixed teams — where a handful of project managers need full feature depth (dependency mapping, release scheduling, resource views) while the rest of the team just needs task assignment and status updates. Every existing tool either goes deep for everyone or stays shallow for everyone. 'Not all features included in the base price and paying for individual features or add-ons is frustrating' is the complaint of someone forced into a binary they didn't want.

This is a sustainable business because the moment a team grows from 5 to 20, the pricing structure stops fitting — and that transition happens constantly. The need isn't episodic; it's triggered by growth, which is ongoing.

What to build

Build a project management product with two distinct capability tiers enforced at the user level — not the organization level — so one account can have 3 seats with full planning features (dependencies, resource load, multi-release assignment) and 17 seats with task-only access, billed accordingly.

Where to start

Go after engineering teams at product companies where the PM and tech lead need full planning visibility but developers just need a task queue — this is one of the most common org shapes and the one most obviously underserved by flat per-seat pricing.

The hard part

The hardest early trade-off is defining exactly which features belong in the 'power' tier versus the 'task' tier — draw that line wrong and the power users feel crippled while task users feel overwhelmed, and neither group recommends it.

How it makes money

Charge per seat with two price points — a low rate (e.g., $4/month) for task-only seats and a higher rate (e.g., $18/month) for planning seats — so the organization's blended cost is lower than upgrading everyone, but revenue per account scales with team size.