Since the beginning, Basecamp has been marketed as a project management and collaboration tool for small businesses (or small teams inside larger businesses).
However, over the years we’ve also heard from thousands of people who use Basecamp outside of work. They’ve gone off-label and turned to Basecamp to help them manage all sorts of personal projects, too. No surprise there – it really works!
So today we’re formally introducing Basecamp Personal – a completely free Basecamp plan designed specifically for freelancers, students, families, and personal projects.
No credit card required. No justification required. No obligation required. No ads. No selling your personal information. It’s Small Tech at its best.
For a single user working on a couple of projects this seems like a really nice free option. And I see they have 2FA built-in that plays nice with Authy, 1password, or any other TOTP-compatible authentication app. Thumbs-up!
Is this not Basecamp playing catch up after losing millions of potential customers to Trello, Asana and Monday.com?
Basecamp was a good early player in the cloud project management space but have had years of a mediocre product during which the others have provided better, more innovative tools. Not sure they will make much traction now.
I don’t know about traction for paying business clients, but I signed up for a free account last night and started playing with it and can see some useful things I can do with the free workspace tier above and beyond other products I use.
This is interesting, and a bit nostalgic. I used Basecamp and Backpack quit a bit when they first came out. (I don’t remember if they were free back then; I assume not.) As the products evolved and merged and the price increased I moved away. It will be fun to play around with the “personal” version. Thanks for the heads up.
I think Basecamp is a capable option. But with Apps like ClickUp, small teams are likely not going to pay $99 a month. So I think they should do a real mid-tier with all features for teams of 5-10.
Perhaps those (Asana, Monday, etc) aren’t the customers Basecamp wants? They seem to be doing ok.
That being said, I did find this Personal/free tier interesting as it seems to be a slight departure from their recent refocusing on Basecamp and offloading Highrise and some other products originally started under the 37 Signals umbrella.