Why planning software costs too much (and what to do about it)

Published April 30, 2026

If you’ve shopped for a Gantt chart in the last five years, you’ve probably noticed the pricing falls into two camps — neither of which is great if you’re a freelancer, an indie studio, or a small team that runs a project every few months instead of every day.

This post is a quick category map and an argument for a third option.

Camp one: the heavy desktop suites

A handful of long-running desktop apps still sell as one-time purchases — and they cost roughly $200 to $350 each. They’re feature-dense (earned-value analysis, baselines, leveling, multi-project rollups, AppleScript automation, the whole project-management apparatus) and they’re aimed squarely at people whose day job is being a project manager.

If that’s you, they’re a fine deal. If your day job is “build the thing,” paying $250 to plan a side project is hard to justify.

Camp two: the subscription web apps

Almost every newer entrant ships as SaaS, billed monthly per seat. Prices land between $10 and $30 per user per month, depending on tier. There’s usually a free plan that turns into a paid plan the moment you cross some arbitrary line — three projects, more than five collaborators, the ability to export.

The wedge here is collaboration. Real-time editing, comments, @-mentions, and integrations matter when you have ten people simultaneously dependent on the chart. They matter much less when there’s one person drawing it.

Subscriptions also assume continuous use. The economics break for bursty work — a freelance project every couple of months, a yearly planning sprint, a one-off contract. You end up paying for twelve months of access to use the tool for two.

Camp three: a one-time, native, file-based app

This is the slot EverGantt sits in. $2.99, once. A 7 MB native app that opens straight into a chart with no login. Files are plain JSON on your machine — open with cat, version with Git, email if you want to share. Stories, tasks, dependencies, multi-assignee tasks, and a stacked team-utilization panel.

It does the 80% case and not much more. You give up:

• Real-time multi-user collaboration. (You can share the file; you can’t both edit it at once.)
• Cloud sync as a built-in feature. (Drop the file in iCloud Drive or Dropbox if you want.)
• Earned-value reports and PMI-style baselines. (If you need these, the heavy desktop suites are still the right answer.)

You get back a chart that doesn’t disappear when your subscription lapses, on a budget that’s basically a rounding error.

How to choose

There’s no universally “best” — only “best for the next chart you have to draw.” If the next chart is “track a side project for three months,” paying $200 is silly. If it’s “deliver a $2M client engagement on time, with audit-grade reports,” $200 is rounding error.

The hidden tax of “free” tools

Free tools are usually the most expensive over time. They monetize by pulling you into their ecosystem and then charging for export, integrations, larger team sizes, or simply for not having ads in your face during a client call. By the time you’ve built a year of charts in someone’s free tier, you’re locked in — they can raise the price and you’ll pay it because the cost of leaving is higher.

A flat-fee app you install and own can’t pull that move. The economic incentives line up: the developer made the tool good once, you bought it once, the relationship is over until you want to upgrade.

What to expect from EverGantt specifically

It’s $2.99. There’s no upsell tier. You will never get an email from us asking you to renew. The file format is plain JSON — if we go out of business tomorrow, you can still read your charts in any text editor and rebuild them in another tool.

If that sounds like the right shape of trade-off, grab a copy.