How to make a Gantt chart without a subscription

Published April 30, 2026

The cheapest way to make a Gantt chart in 2026 is — surprisingly — not free. It’s $2.99, once. That’s because every “free” Gantt tool I tried over the last five years either:

1. Stopped being free after the first project,
2. Required an account I had to manage forever, or
3. Locked the chart export behind a paywall the moment I needed to share it.

This post is a quick walkthrough of what a one-time-payment, fully native, fully offline Gantt chart actually looks like in practice — and the tradeoffs you accept by going this route.

Why subscriptions feel wrong for personal planning

A Gantt chart is a file, not a service. Once it’s drawn, you don’t need a server to keep showing it to you. But almost every Gantt tool today ships as SaaS because subscriptions print money. You pay $15/month not because the product costs $15/month to run — your timeline is 40 KB of text — but because the company has decided you should rent the right to look at it.

For team planning at a 50-person company, that economic model is fine. For a freelancer who runs three projects a year, it’s absurd.

What “native, no subscription” actually means

The version of EverGantt I shipped is a 7 MB native app. It saves files as plain JSON with an .evgnt extension. You can open them with cat. You can put them in Git. You can email them. There is no account, no login, no cloud — opening the app puts you straight into a chart.

That sounds obvious and yet almost no Gantt tool today works this way. The few remaining one-time-purchase desktop apps in the category sit at $200 to $350 — priced for full-time project managers in regulated industries, and overkill for someone who just wants to plan a side project.

What it actually does

A Gantt chart in EverGantt is a list of stories (high-level phases) with tasks underneath each one. You add stories and tasks, you set their dates, and you connect tasks that depend on each other. Dependent tasks shift automatically when their predecessor moves, so you don’t spend time hand-correcting the timeline every time something slips.

For team capacity, you can assign more than one teammate to a task with hour estimates per person. The capacity panel at the bottom stacks those hours by week so you can see at a glance who’s overloaded.

When you’re done, save the file. It lives wherever you put it on disk — no cloud step, no sync. That’s the entire app.

What you give up

You give up real-time collaboration. You give up cloud sync (unless you put the file in a cloud drive yourself). You give up @-mentions and comments. If those are critical to how your team works, this is the wrong tool — pick one of the team-collaboration suites instead.

You also give up integration with PMI-style baselines and earned-value tracking. EverGantt is for the 80% case: stories, tasks, dependencies, capacity. The 20% case (large enterprise PM workflows) is what the heavy desktop suites exist for.

The tradeoff is the point

Software that bills once is software the developer has to make good before they ship — they can’t fix the economics with a subscription page later. That constraint is good for the user. The fewer features, the fewer subscription tiers, the closer the price is to the actual cost of building the thing.

If $2.99 once and a JSON file you own sounds right, grab a copy.