What "free" means here
It means free.
- Unlimited projects. No "10-board limit" coming later.
- Unlimited teammates. No "premium for 5+ users".
- Every view, every feature. Kanban, Table, Calendar, Gantt, Chat, DMs, Notes, Wiki, Goals, Diagrams, Canvas. Nothing is gated.
- AI coworker included. Connect Claude or ChatGPT once and the integration just works. There is 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".
The only optional thing is a one-time donation if you want to support the project. It doesn't unlock anything. It's a tip jar.
Why
We built Comuna first 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. Without that generosity we wouldn't have shipped anything.
The honest version is: 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.
How it's sustainable
The infra cost per active user, broken down:
- Supabase (postgres + auth + realtime): ~$0.01–0.03/user/month at our scale. Real-time WebSocket connections are the heaviest part; the data itself is mostly text.
- Cloudflare (Pages + R2 + Workers): the 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.
Our marginal cost per active user is small. Our fixed cost is small (we're tiny). We can sustain this without a sales motion. If we ever can't, we'll be honest — 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.
How Comuna compares
We're not bashing anyone. These are excellent tools — we just made a different bet.
| Comuna | Trello | Asana | Monday | Notion | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Whole product, forever | Limited (10 boards) | Limited (15 users) | Limited (2 users) | Generous, but no PM views |
| Kanban / Table / Calendar / Gantt | All ✓ | Kanban only on free | Mostly gated | Mostly gated | DIY |
| Chat / DMs built in | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| AI coworker (real teammate) | ✓ | ✗ | Premium AI | Premium AI | Premium AI |
| AI cost to you | Your own subscription | Per-seat charge | Per-seat charge | Per-seat charge | Per-seat charge |
(Names compared in the spirit of honest comparison, not put-down.)
What this is not
- Not "free until we get funding then we charge". We are not VC-funded. There is no "Series A in 18 months" pressure. The free tier is the product.
- Not "open source" in the strict sense, yet. The codebase is currently 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.
- Not data-hostage either. You can export everything. No "export available on Premium" trap.
How to support the project (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.
If you want to chip in financially, the optional one-time donation is in the app. We use it for hosting and to keep the developer who works on Comuna fed.
Start your workspace. Five seconds, no card.