Can you share more about Tenzu's income sources / financial sustainability situation?

Questions & Help
1

Hi,

I’m a prospective user of Tenzu or Taiga (or some similar alternative). I found Tenzu via the Taiga website, and I haven’t used either substantively but made accounts on both to give them a bit of a test run.

The TL;DR that I gather from different sources across the two forums and websites is that:

  • Tenzu is actively maintained and developed but not accepting outside contributors yet, but has an intention to involve external contributors in the future (I think?)
  • Taiga is maintained (I think?) but not in active development (and therefore no longer working with external contributors, I think?)
  • over time, it looks like the intention is to have Tenzu naturally surpass Taiga as the default choice between the two once Tenzu covers feature parity with Taiga but with an improved UI/UX/etc. and folks actively working on it

If I’m misunderstanding anything, please let me know. In my experience, it was confusing and time consuming for me to piece together what is actually happening, and I’m still not really confident in my understanding. (I saw the mention of communications efforts in the retrospective so hopefully those efforts will help future folks.)

Anyway, my question is: might you please elaborate on Tenzu’s Income Sources that are shown in the retrospective and/or other information about where Tenzu is at financially?

For context, I’m working on a django project and currently use a mix of spreadsheet, notes, GitHub Issues, and GitHub Projects for project management / bugs / feedback / idea / etc. information. I like the idea of consolidating and transitioning to use an open source django-based tool instead which is (of course) how I found y’all in the first place :slight_smile:

Tenzu is not suitable for my needs yet, but it seems like the Biru team is still working on it and committed to seeing it through. I haven’t fully tested it yet, but I think Taiga is capable of most (if not all) of my use case as is. I saw Tenzu’s import Taiga projects exists now and also there are plans to do something like what Taiga has with the Github as well (though if I go this route, I’d probably import to Taiga now and then import that Taiga project to Tenzu instead of trying to combine a github and taiga import directly into Tenzu).

I’m wondering if it’s a little too risky for me to start using Taiga for now (despite knowing that it is likely on the decline) with the intention to transition to Tenzu as soon as it has the capabilities for my use case. For that plan to feel less risky, I’d have to be confident that Tenzu is going to:

  1. have the features I’ll use in Taiga and be able to import it without any data loss and
  2. be around long enough to make the product into something valuable enough that Tenzu becomes financially stable on its own

1 seems likely, but I’m feeling nervous about 2.

I think 2 is possible, but I’m just not sure where my confidence in Tenzu’s longevity should come from since it currently has a pretty minimal product, only ~300 users that may or may not be donating something, six staff members (hopefully being paid in some way), and no outside volunteers that are contributing for free. On the other hand, I saw the mention of various Sources of Income in the retrospective, so I don’t want to write off the Taiga-to-Tenzu plan as too risky for me just yet.

Is there anything else that might be relevant and/or reassuring to hear given this context?

Obviously feel free to provide as much or as little detail as desired. There’s no judgment here no matter what (y’all are on quite an admirable quest, and I already respect that heaps!). I’m really just trying to understand the situation more in order to make a decision for what to do right now; I’ll still keep an eye on Tenzu regardless.

2

Silly me - I just found an earlier post discussing Tenzu’s financials which does provide more details

If you have updates since then, feel free to share but no worries otherwise

3

Hi @StephanieGoulet , welcome and thanks for your consideration,

I’ll try to answer your questions:

That’s right, for now we are still working on to many core things and the team lacks resources to onboard new contributors, but we ultimately want to open the project to contribution. We also want to develop a plugin system to cater to specific needs we might not want to support in the main app.

From what we know that is the case. The project is still maintained by the team behind the official SaaS in order to keep it running, but the project is no longer evolving and the original team is no longer working on the project.

Yes exactly, Tenzu is Taiga-Next reborn ;)

Sorry about the information about this being scattered, we did try to document it but it was a bit of a journey!

Now about our financial state (and there is no secret here, we are fully committed to transparency):

We are currently 3 people working full time on this (we were 6 at the start but part of the team left pretty quickly after we adopted Tenzu, mostly because we needed to lower the wages of everyone in order to make this project viable in the long run until it can take off).

Since you found our post about our first annual financial report, I can add that in the meantime, we were selected for an NlNet grant (more details in the last section here) which is financing our current work to get features parity with Taiga for the kanban module.

With only what we have now, admitting we don’t manage to secure any other source of income in the meantime, we currently have a runway until the end of 2027, which is plenty of time to get Tenzu much further than it is now.

We already thought about the worst-case scenario, if that happen, most of the team will take bread-and-butter job and continue to work on Tenzu on the side. We love this project and are committed to see it through no matter what. Of course, that would slow development a fair bit and impact quality so this would be last recourse.

We are not worried though, Taiga has a huge users base (20M+) so even the most pessimistic of our projection ensure the adventure continue.
There has also been recent global acknowledgement in Europe that depending on proprietary American software might be a tiny bit risky, so there is a lot of interest in us coming from this also.

Our company has also started investing some time into another project: LaSuite.coop, which is an open French cooperative that offers opensource hosting of a GAFAM suite alternative (if you speak French, the presentation video is pretty awesome).
We are not afraid to diversify our activity a bit (according to our values) in order to make the company more robust and ensure we continue to be there for years to come :)
What we are never considering however, is external investment from VCs that want shares and decision power, because we want to preserve Tenzu independency; that’s why we chose the cooperative model.

I hope this can make you more confident that we’re here to stay ;)

If you haven’t yet, we would love to get your feedback on what you need from Tenzu by filling the form we have ongoing to know about our potential users base better :)

And, of course, please feel free to ask any other questions you may have.

1 Like
4

Thanks so much for taking the time to write all this out.

I heard of La Suite Numérique through the djangochat episode with Samuel Paccoud, but not LaSuite.coop which seems similar but separate (not sure if there’s a relation or not since it seems a little too similar to be a coincidence). Candidly, I’m not understanding how diversifying company time with LaSuite.coop contributions would make Tenzu itself more robust and long-term. Or perhaps you’re implying a strategy for Tenzu to potentially join under the umbrella organization of LaSuite.coop?

Anyway, I feel I understand the situation more, and that alone is reassuring. I very much appreciate a lot of things you’ve confirmed/explained/described (staying independent, opening to contributors in the future, plugin capability, etc).

I already filled out the form minimally when I first came across it but didn’t have time to fill out all the optional / descriptive questions at the time. The main newest/most important thing I’m keeping an eye on was related to your comment from the django forum thread:

Today, we don’t have any way to make a project “public”, either in read-only or otherwise. You need an account and to have been invited to collaborate on the project. That doesn’t mean it won’t come one day (and it was planned in Taiga Next initially), but this is not part of our current roadmap

I’m glad you flagged this (thank you) because, before reading it, I had been assuming that this capability was more of a “when” not “if” because of what you also referenced about TaigaNext planning for it. Raising this makes me curious what portion of the 20M Taiga user base you mentioned had public vs private projects.

My project isn’t open source right now so I wasn’t that concerned with needing to wait a bit for it, but it’s almost certainly going to be open source in the future, so being able to use the ticket tracker in a public capacity will eventually be a necessity.

Anyway, fwiw, I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Tenzu’s development by looking at the roadmap every now and again; thanks again to you and your team for working on this awesome project!! :green_heart: