VanillaPM

Hey IndieHackers 👋

I'm Ahsan, a solo founder in Dhaka. Three months ago I started building the tool I'd wished existed for a decade — last month I shipped 1.0. This is the intro + the honest numbers.

What it is VanillaPM runs the whole PMBOK 8th-edition project lifecycle — charter to closeout — in one place: WBS, critical-path Gantt, Earned Value, Monte Carlo forecasting, risk/assumption registers, a governed knowledge base, sprints/Kanban, plus an ERM finance/HR/payroll side for small NGOs, and a free PMP learning centre. Django + DRF + PostgreSQL, server-rendered with Alpine.js (no SPA). ~96k lines of Python, 58 modules, ~2,200 tests. Solo.

The sub-$700 breakdown (to reach 1.0)

• Hosting (VPS, 1yr prepaid): $204

• Business email (prepaid 4yrs): $229

• AI coding credits (Claude): $150

• Claude + GitHub subscriptions (3 months): $72

• Domain + misc: ~$3

• Total: ~$658

Two honest caveats on that number: a big chunk is prepaid multi-year (email is 4 years, hosting a year), so the actual monthly cost to build was tiny — my real cash run-rate is ~$46/mo. And the biggest lever wasn't money, it was AI-assisted development — that's how one person shipped something this size in a quarter.

Why I made it free The tools that truly teach project management are enterprise-priced, and the cheap ones teach nothing. I kept watching students, NGO staff and freelancers in emerging markets get shut out of serious PM purely by price. So the core is free — no trial, no seat limits, no paywall.

How I plan to survive (the question you're all thinking): Free stays free. I'll charge later for managed AI (bring-your-own-key is free; managed inference is metered), paid org/finance tiers where the willingness-to-pay actually sits, and eventually a teaching business suite. Pre-revenue by design — build the funnel first.

I build in the open and I'll share the real numbers here — the wins and the flops. New accounts get a fully-seeded sample project, so you can poke around without setting anything up.

Would love this crowd's read on one thing: for a free-first product where the payers (orgs) aren't the free users (learners), what would you watch first — activation, or the learn→org bridge? Genuinely asking.

— Ahsan