Jason Fried launches Fizzy: a colorful, open-source Kanban tool at $20/month unlimited

Summary

Jason Fried launched Fizzy on December 3, 2025 — a standalone, open-source Kanban tool built by 37signals as a deliberate alternative to bloated project management software. The pitch is simplicity and color in a category Fried sees as uniformly grey.

The product took 18 months to build, with roughly six people cycling through at various points and typically two or three working at any one time. Because it was open-sourced from the first commit, the entire development history — dead ends, staffing changes, direction shifts — is visible on GitHub, which Fried notes is almost unheard of for a commercial product.

Pricing

Fizzy runs at $20 per month, unlimited users. No pricing tiers, no per-seat chart, no "contact us." Fried frames it as accessory pricing — something people might run alongside other tools rather than replace them. The free tier gives users 1,000 cards with no time limit; if they never exhaust that, it stays free. Anyone who prefers not to pay can self-host it, including on a basic Digital Ocean droplet. 37signals hosts on its own hardware across data centers in Chicago, Amsterdam, and North Carolina. Fried flags the $20 price as introductory and says it could rise, though existing customers would be locked in at their current rate.

No AI in V1

Fizzy ships without AI features, and Fried is unapologetic about it. His argument is that AI is arriving at the OS and browser layer anyway — through tools like computer-use agents — so a focused product may never need to build it in directly. OpenAI recently added a Basecamp connector to ChatGPT without any work from 37signals, which Fried cites as validation of that thesis. He also notes that open-source contributors could submit AI-related pull requests if demand materializes.

Basecamp and the standalone logic

Basecamp already has a Kanban view called Card Table, and Fried says Basecamp has around 100,000 accounts. Fizzy is a separate product because Basecamp is a larger system suited to bigger projects, and a standalone lightweight tool can reach people who would never sign up for the full suite.

Competitor philosophy

Fried is direct that 37signals named Trello in its launch positioning. His broader view on competition is that fixating on rivals is mostly a distraction — you can't control them, you don't know their economics, and most company failures are self-inflicted. He uses Hey, the company's email product with 40,000-plus paying customers, as the illustration: a number that would be a disaster for Gmail is a multi-million-dollar business for a 60-person team. The only competition that matters, in his framing, is your own cost structure.

His one honest concession to competitive anxiety came in 2006, when Slack launched and Fried says he felt genuine dread watching it leapfrog Campfire, 37signals' group-chat product. Slack's onboarding, integrations, and IRC-derived channel structure did things Campfire hadn't cracked. Basecamp was unaffected, but Campfire specifically stung.