We're building an AI-native QA platform — here's why the testing tools market is ripe for disruption

The Day I Got Angry at Jira

I was watching a QA engineer spend 45 minutes yesterday jumping between six different tools to execute one test run. Not exaggerating. She'd log into the test management platform to see what to test. Jump to the app. Back to the tool to document. Into Slack to ask a question. Back to the app. Into a spreadsheet because that's where the actual test data lived.

That's when I knew we had to build something different.

I'm a developer-turned-founder, and my co-founder has spent the last eight years as a QA engineer at scaling startups. When we started talking about what's broken in software testing, we realized it wasn't just inefficient—it was fundamentally designed for a different era. The QA tools market is dominated by players charging 30-50 dollars per seat, per month, with UX that feels like it was built in 2008 and never touched again.

We started Testably three months ago. We're bootstrapped, we're small, and we're betting everything on the belief that QA tooling deserves to be better.

What's Actually Wrong With Today's QA Tools

Let me be specific about what we're seeing in the market:

Per-seat pricing is broken. When you're a startup growing from 5 to 50 people, a platform that costs $40/person/month becomes a real budget item. It's why teams build Sheets-based workarounds instead of adopting proper tools. We've talked to founders who literally can't afford to add QA engineers because the tooling costs scale with headcount. That's insane.

The UX is fragmented. You're bouncing between tabs, losing context, repeating information. There's no flow. No keyboard shortcuts. No sense that the tool was designed around how humans actually test software. It's like every interaction was designed in isolation.

Exploratory testing is still manual friction. Most tools treat exploration like a second-class citizen. You test something, you find a bug, you write it down in a field, it vanishes into a backlog somewhere. There's no structure. No way to see patterns across exploratory sessions. No heatmaps showing which features are breaking most often. You're flying blind.

Release decisions are guesswork. When your CEO asks "are we ready to ship?" you're either saying "yeah, probably" or you're spending a day compiling a spreadsheet of test coverage metrics. There's no objective, automated way to know if you're really ready.

What We're Building

Testably is an AI-native QA test management platform designed to fix these problems. We're not trying to replicate what exists at $10 cheaper. We're rethinking the whole experience.

Three things we're betting on:

1. Focus Mode. This is what that QA engineer should have been using yesterday. You open a test run, and everything else disappears. You see the test steps, the requirements, the app under test. Full keyboard control. Zero context-switching. When you're in Focus Mode, testing is all you do. We've found this can cut test execution time by 30-40% just by eliminating mental overhead.

2. Discovery Log. This is for exploratory testing, which is where most real bugs live. Instead of typing notes into a text field, you're walking through a structured workflow: you find something, you capture it, you categorize it, you move on. The system learns where bugs are showing up. You get heatmaps. You can see "okay, the checkout flow is flaky, let's invest there." Exploration becomes data.

3. Release Readiness Score. We automatically aggregate your test coverage, automation status, bug severity distribution, and recency of testing into a single 0-100 score. Ship or no-ship. It's not perfect, but it beats guessing. And it's transparent—you can drill into every input to the score.

Plus: AI test generation. Write your requirements. We help you generate test cases. It's not a replacement for thinking, but it's a starting point that saves hours.

Why We're Doing Flat Pricing

Here's something I want to be honest about: we could make more money per customer with per-seat pricing. A team of 20 paying $35/seat/month is $8,400/year. But we'd also be pricing out exactly the teams we want to serve—growing startups that can't afford to scale headcount when tooling costs scale too.

We decided on flat, per-project pricing instead. Starter at $49/month. Professional at $99/month. Enterprise from $249/month, unlimited projects and seats. You add engineers without the tool getting more expensive. That's the whole point.

Is this the optimal business model? Honestly, we don't know yet. It might hurt us. But it felt like the right call for what we're trying to do—make quality engineering accessible to teams that are building fast but don't have unlimited budget.

We're also launching with a generous free tier: three projects, three members, everything except collaboration features. We want people to actually use this and find real value before they have to pay.

Where We Are Now

We've been building for three months. We have a private beta with eight teams, ranging from seed startups to Series B companies. The feedback has been really encouraging. People are actually excited about testing, which tells us something is different.

We're planning a Product Hunt launch for April 15th. That's 16 days away. We're nervous and excited about it in equal measure.

Our roadmap is visible at testably.app if you want to see what's coming. We're still building, still iterating, still figuring out what matters most.

I Want to Learn From You

Here's what I'm thinking about as we grow:

For anyone who's built developer tools or QA products: How do you balance shipping features with keeping the product simple? We keep wanting to add everything. Every problem we hear about feels urgent. But we also know that kitchen-sink tools are how we ended up in this mess. What's your philosophy?

For folks who've launched on Product Hunt: What actually mattered? We're preparing, we're nervous we're not doing enough, but I'm also wondering if "doing enough" is even the right frame. What surprised you about the launch experience?

And more broadly: If you've felt the pain of QA tooling, or you're thinking about building something adjacent—let's talk. I want to learn what we're missing.

We're going to keep shipping, keep building in public, and keep sharing real numbers and real challenges. This is going to be messy, and that's kind of the point.

Come find us at testably.app, or hit me up in the comments.