👋 Hello everyone,
it's David here, nice to meet you. Let me briefly introduce myself and share some insights about what has been going on with Costlocker and what the future plans are.
And I'm founder of IT Lab a company, which acquired Costlocker in July 2021.
With many of you, we already met on our support chat or a zoom call. I'm part of the Costlocker since 2020 as the head of Product and Customer Success.
IT Lab today celebrates 10th anniversary. We are not an investment company. We are a small, dedicated company which mostly builds digital products and services for other companies. We use Costlocker for our own needs since 2017. And we really love it. So we decided to get Costlocker on board and continue with its development.
We have no external funding, no outside push for quick growth and exit. We are in this for a long time and we are looking forward to work on Costlocker.
What was happening
You didn't hear about Costlocker already for a long time. This is a first article on Costlocker blog after two years.
Last year Costlocker stood in front of big technical decisions - mostly if we want to keep the existing tech stack or we want to rebuild Costlocker guts from scratch.
Rebuilding it from scratch will help us to introduce new features and grow faster, but it will push us to stop working on new features for a year.
Continue with the existing tech stack will let us continue work on new features, but outdated technologies will catch us later.
As I mentioned earlier, we are planning to work on Costlocker for a looong time. So we closed ourselves in the office and start working on this. The main goal is to upgrade the technology, not the user interface.
We started to work on this in Q2 2020 and we are finally ready to put the upgrade on production.
We will post an article about the technology upgrade for tech-savvy people later.
What is happening
We have two new things which we are currently rolling out.
Currently we are catching last bugs and we're going to run the upgraded application.
1. Scheduling
Scheduling is a whole new feature that will help you with resource management and capacity planning for your projects. You can easily plan work for people and manage teams/people's capacities.
We are currently going to launch this feature in closed Beta for some customers to get feedback. If you want to be in the prior group as a beta user, please contact us on chat or support@costlocker.com.
We are planning to run this feature for all customers in Q4 in beta version. (This feature will most likely be available in beta to all customers in late Q3/ early Q4. )We are going to continue implement the new feature across the whole application later this year.
Please don't worry about any additional fees, this feature will be part of existing subscription.
2. New payment gateway
Many of you noticed problems with payments. There were some technical issues with 3D Secure with the existing gateway and we decided to change the payment provider to get more flexibility.
For annual and half-year subscriptions we have implemented a new credit system for not used licenses.
Long story short, if you have an annual or half-year license, you will save more money than you did until now. More information about this you will find soon in the help section.
We already started migrating some existing accounts (companies) to a new payment gateway. If you want to be in the prior group, please contact us on chat or support@costlocker.com.
Future plans
Launching a new backend and scheduling module is just a begining.
We've strengthened our development team and we want to continue investments into the product.
Zapier / Integromat integrations
We're designing and prototyping integrations with Zapier and Integromat. This will empower you with integration Costlocker into company even more.
Custom views in projects We want to let you build your own views into projects and business reports and let you save them into tabs.
As my first article, this is longer than enough. We will post here updates more often.
If you have any questions / comments please contact me directly on david@costlocker.com.
Thank you for you support!
David
