A lot of project management tools say "free" and mean "free until you need three teammates, or a fourth board, or to actually export your data". So when we say Comuna is free forever, the reasonable reaction is to assume there's a catch. There isn't, and the right thing to do is explain why we built it that way and how it works under the hood.
The actual reason
We built Comuna for our own projects. When we started our first startup years ago, open source carried us — the server we couldn't afford, the library we could, the boilerplate we cloned from a public repo, the patient answers on Stack Overflow at 2am. Without that generosity we'd never have shipped anything.
This is the part most "we believe in open" pages glide over: we didn't pay back to open source by donating to one project once. We paid back by making a tool that other small teams who are starting could just use, the way we used the libraries. There's no asterisk because there wasn't one when we needed help.
If Comuna helps a team somewhere that's just getting off the ground, the years of building it were worth it. That's the entire business model. It is, at this stage, a generosity-driven product, not a margin-driven one.
What "free" actually means in our case
- Unlimited projects. No "10 boards limit" coming later.
- Unlimited teammates. No "premium for 5+ users".
- Every view, every feature. Kanban, Table, Calendar, Gantt, Chat, DMs, Notes, Wiki, Goals, Diagrams. No feature is gated.
- AI coworker included. You connect Claude or ChatGPT once and the integration just works. There's no premium AI tier — you use your own AI subscription, and we don't take a cut of those tokens.
- No credit card to sign up. No "free trial that auto-converts".
There is one thing you can optionally do: a one-time donation if you want to support the project. It doesn't unlock anything. It's a tip jar.
What we do with your data
The honest list:
- We don't sell your data. Not to anyone. Not in aggregate, not anonymised.
- We don't train models on your data. Not ours, not anyone else's.
- We don't share your data with the AI vendors beyond the calls you initiated. When Claude or ChatGPT reads a card on your behalf, that card is shipped to that vendor via MCP for that specific call. Anthropic and OpenAI handle it according to their own data policies (and they do not train on consumer-tier API calls by default). We don't proxy it through ourselves, we don't keep a copy, we don't replay it.
- Your data lives in Supabase and Cloudflare R2. Encrypted in transit. Row-level security on every database table, scoped to your workspace.
- You can export everything. Boards, cards, comments, attachments. No "export available on Premium" trap.
How this is sustainable
This is the question people are actually asking when they ask "why free". So: the infrastructure cost. Per active user per month, the dominant costs are:
- Supabase (postgres + auth + realtime). At our scale, ~$0.01–0.03/user/month — most of Comuna's data is text. Real-time WebSocket connections are the heaviest part.
- Cloudflare (Pages + R2 + Workers + KV). Pages and Workers free tier covers the landing and the MCP gateway. R2 is ~$0.015/GB/month for attachments.
- AI: zero on our side. Every AI call uses the user's own Claude or ChatGPT plan. We don't proxy tokens; we don't pay an inference bill that scales with user activity.
That last bullet is the structural reason this works. In every other "AI in your tool" product, scaling users means scaling an inference bill. In Comuna's model, AI usage scales with the user's own subscription, not ours. The AI is additive but cost-neutral to us.
So our marginal cost per active user is small, our fixed cost is small (we are a tiny team), and we can sustain it without a sales motion. If we ever can't, we'll be honest about it — we'd ask for donations more visibly, or look at a B2B angle for very large teams (custom deployments, SLAs). The home page and the core product stay free regardless.
What this is not
This is not a "free until we get funding then we charge" play. We're not VC-funded. There is no "Series A in 18 months" pressure on the roadmap. The free tier is the product.
It is also not "open source" in the strict sense yet. The codebase is private. Whether to open-source the frontend is something we revisit periodically; for now the answer is "not yet" because we want to ship the AI coworker patterns first without a thousand forks debating the API surface. Watch this space.
How to support it (if you want to)
Tell another small team starting out. That's the highest-leverage thing. Comuna grows the way it can sustain — by being passed from team to team, the way the open-source libraries that got us here grew.
If you also want to chip in financially, there's a one-time donation in the app. We use it for hosting and to keep the developer who works on Comuna fed. Thank you.
Comuna — your team and your AI coworker. Free forever, no credit card. Try it.