Basecamp is open for business
After four months of development, 37signals and I have completed and launched Basecamp 1.0. It's a hosted service for flexible project management composed of categorized weblogs sprinkled with contacts, milestones, and todo-list tracking. There's no fee for single-project setups, up to 10 active projects is $19/month, 25 is $39, and unlimited is $59. 37signals explains pricing and the offering in detail on BasecampHQ and answers questions on Everything Basecamp.
Basecamp has been my most challenging and engaging project yet. Its been my first project in Ruby, the first to embrace
unit testing, and twice the duration of any former commercial contract. It consists of just above 10,000 lines of Ruby code, which includes the upcoming web-app framework Rails that I've been developing in parallel.
Aside from the technical thrills, it's been a very rewarding domain to work with. Basecamp appeals to me as a consultant and a student. It's exactly the kind of tool I've been trying to stitch together multiple times over the years from various disconnected pieces of social software.
Basecamp is already facilitating the communication and coordination of its own development (eating our own dogfood), my bachelor's project, and will be doing the same for another upcoming consulting project. I'm especially fond of the RSS and iCal integration (and their reasonable security measures).
But there's no reason to praise your own work, when you can have others do it for you. Jason has compiled an already impressive array of reviews and quotes on the Everything Basecamp site that includes: "Best project management UI I've ever seen", "Pure genius and a perfect use of technology", and "Basecamp is incredibly empowering... and utilizes the web's communications capabilities like nothing I've seen before".
So regardless of whether you're a consultant, student, designer, accountant, recruiter, author, or musician I invite you to take a look at Basecamp and be inspired.
