Plaky

We’re still new to GoodFirms — we use the Free plan — but merely being on this platform is bound to reflect positively on both the visibility and reputation of our products.

Plaky is a flexible and customizable project management tool for managing work in all kinds of organizations. Regardless of the industry you’re in or the type of work you do — project management, operations management, or anything else — Plaky is designed to help you stay on top of your tasks.

I am the CEO at Cake.com, the holding company behind Plaky, as well as two other SaaS products, Clockify and Pumble.

We felt that large companies, like Monday, ClickUp, and Asana, were overcharging for their services. They all offer free plans but hide some basic functionalities behind paywalls — like the number of users or projects, you can add. Their free plans are designed to trap customers into purchasing expensive paid plans.

So, despite this being a highly competitive and saturated market, we saw this huge market gap that looked ripe for the taking. We believe every team should be able to have access to their data without having to pay a fortune. And that’s what Plaky is about — it’s a project management app that anyone can use for absolutely free.

The goal with Plaky has always been to increase transparency, collaboration, and efficiency in teams and to make work simpler and more enjoyable.

We’ve already mentioned some of this, but basically, there are 4 major benefits to using Plaky.

First, Plaky does not and will not lock essential functionalities behind a paywall. The free plan supports unlimited users, unlimited projects, and unlimited files. And this will not change. We used the same model with Clockify and Pumble, and it has worked great both for our users and us. So there are no traps with Plaky.

Second, Plaky is flexible. Our goal was to make a tool that can adapt to the needs of our clients, no matter their size or industry. We have users in marking, software development, HR, Sales and CRM, public sectors, etc.. The reason is that Plaky is customizable enough that you can adjust its features to support any type of workflow — Plaky serves to accommodate your needs, rather than you having to work to accommodate its arbitrary limitations.

Third, Plaky is simple to use. It’s easy to forget that not all people who use software for work are tech-savvy. Our philosophy is that software should be as simple as possible to navigate so as not to be a burden but rather a trusted partner in your daily work.

Lastly, we offer first-class customer support, to which many of our users can attest to.
Our competitors may also offer some of these benefits in their solutions, but not all of them.

Our users largely come from the service-providing sector, no matter if they’re small or medium-sized, startups or big corporations, government agencies, or NGOs. The fields they work in include Project Management, Marketing, Software Development, Sales & CRM, HR, etc.

But our customer base is by no means limited to these industries. Plaky is highly flexible and can be customized to fit anyone’s needs.

At the moment, our users can choose to organize their tasks in either table or Kanban view, and they can track their workflow using completely customizable columns to track relevant task elements, like assignees, status, and urgency.

Plaky also offers free templates, i.e. pre-configured boards suitable for different industries and types of projects. They allow users to kickstart their projects with ease instead of having to create a board from scratch.

But if you do want to start from scratch, you won’t have any trouble navigating the platform as it’s highly intuitive and user-friendly.
 

I have always believed that the key to building successful software lies in adapting to the market, more so than in innovating. There is a huge gap in the market when it comes to free plans that don’t try to manipulate you into getting a paid plan through arbitrary limitations, so our free plan is the feature that sets us apart the most.

Plaky is truly and forever free. We will implement paid plans as we continue to develop this product, but they won’t paywall essential features, like the number of users or projects you can add or manage.

We absolutely consider it a win that users have taken to Plaky’s free plan and seem satisfied with it enough to keep using it, but Plaky is not monetized as of yet. Even so, Plaky users still get the benefit of our world-class customer support that boasts a satisfaction score of over 96% and is available via email, chat, or phone 24/7, even on holidays. 

We have received recommendations and requests from users via these channels, which we keep in mind when planning new features.

However, the Plaky team also gets a lot of internal input from all employees at Cake.com. All of our teams use Plaky to manage their workflow. So, that means that, for example, our Sales team can recommend or request features that would make their workflow simpler, our HR team can do the same, and the same goes for Marketing, Development, Design, Security, and all other teams.

The products we build are the products we use, which enables us to zoom in on any pain points and address them promptly. And with a team of over 360 and counting, our company is the perfect testing ground.

Since Plaky still doesn’t have any paid plans, we’re not talking about customers per se, so we can’t really talk about repeat or recurring customers yet.

As the app’s only been on the market for less than a year, it’s still gaining traction — although around 6,000 organizations already use it.

Absolutely. As mentioned, our goal is to make Plaky as easy to use as we can, so we offer a lot of resources.

There’s a lot of helpful information on our website, including a video demo, screenshots, feature descriptions, and use cases to best show potential users how they can best use our product. I’ve already mentioned the template center with ready-made board templates. There’s also the help center, which provides detailed instructions on anything from how to get started with the app to administration and customization options.

Plaky roadmap is also available on the websites, so users can always see what changes are in the works, what we’re planning to do, and what we’ve recently finished.

We also use social media to promote new features and showcase how they are used.

Beyond this, we have a knowledge hub and blog that delve into project management and many related topics. Anyone can use these resources to learn more about different project management methodologies, roles, statistics, and so on. Plaky can be made to accommodate any workflow, but these resources can help our users streamline their workflows.

Finally, they can always contact us through the various channels our support agents are available on.

As I mentioned, although Plaky is “a new kid on the block”, its support is a well-versed team of pros who have successfully handled Cake.com’s big client base for years. So, Plaky users’ needs are in the hands of a team with an impeccable pedigree who are available 24/7 for all their issues and queries. Most platforms don’t offer that kind of support for free.

Plaky is still in development and doesn’t offer any paid plans. So, as it has not been monetized yet, there has been no revenue in 2022. When we release paid plans further down the line, we’ll be able to talk about revenue.

If we’re talking about just Plaky, our strategic focus for the following years will be to roll out new features and make it profitable, all while maintaining our high standard of security. In 10 years, I hope to see Plaky become synonymous with project and task management.

But Plaky is just one of the products we’re developing. At the moment, Cake.com is developing, expanding, and supporting Clockify, Pumble, and Plaky.

This year, we also plan to launch a Cake.com marketplace, where developers will be able to sell add-ons for our products, as well as the Cake.com account, a system for better integration and easier access to different parts of our ecosystem.

In the coming decade, we plan to develop a suite of business software that all integrate with one another, making Cake.com the default choice for businesses seeking reliable time-tracking (Clockify), team communication (Pumble), and project management (Plaky) solutions, as well as any other tools we release.