Microsoft Planner is not a ticket system

You know what isn't a ticket system? Microsoft Planner. You know what I used for years? Microsoft Planner.

This post is about why Ticket Foundry exists.

How it usually starts

Some version of this story plays out at thousands of companies:

IT support requests come in by email, by hallway ambush, by Teams DM, by phone
The team needs some way to track them so things don't fall through the cracks
Real ticketing software costs real money per user per month
Someone says "we already have Planner, let's just use that"
Three years later you're a 12-person IT team with 4 boards, 7 labels that nobody remembers the meaning of, a "WAITING" bucket with 380 cards in it, and a vague sense that you're losing your mind

Planner was built as a lightweight task management tool for small teams running small projects. It is genuinely good at that. It is not good at:

Knowing who reported a problem
Tracking SLA / response times
Searching across closed items
Filtering by category and priority at the same time
Reporting on anything meaningful
Routing tickets to the right person automatically
End users submitting tickets without an O365 account
Audit trails of what changed when
Templates for "the printer is broken again"

Every one of these things is a feature you can hack onto Planner with enough effort. None of them are features Planner was designed for.

What I actually wanted

I'm an IT guy. I've been using ticket systems my entire career. I've used ServiceNow ($$$), Zendesk ($$$), Freshservice ($$), Jira Service Management ($$$), spiceworks (free but...), GLPI (free, runs on PHP, fine, has a UI from 2008), osTicket (same vibe), Zoho Desk, Solarwinds, Notepad.

Every one of them had something I liked and three things I hated.

What I actually wanted:

A clean kanban board I could just look at and know what's going on
Tickets, projects, and tasks in one place — not three separate apps
A public submit form for end users that doesn't require them to make an account
Self-hosted because the data is ours and I don't want a per-seat tax that scales with my headcount
Email notifications that work out of the box
Reports I'd actually look at, not the 47-tab dashboard that comes with the expensive options
Templates for the predictable tickets (every workplace has them — onboarding, offboarding, printer)

And critically: it had to be cheap enough that small IT teams can actually afford it. Not "free trial, then $50/user/month after the first 5 users" cheap. Actually cheap. Like, "the IT department's coffee budget" cheap.

So I built it

I started Ticket Foundry on a Sunday in late April. Wrote the first version in Flask because that's what I had handy. It was running on my laptop within a few hours. Within two weeks it had a kanban board, projects, themes, and an installer.

We're launching publicly this summer. One-time price. Self-hosted PHP/MySQL. Works on any boring shared host. No per-seat pricing, ever, on principle.

What's next on the blog

I'm going to write a few posts over the next couple weeks about how this thing actually got built — the war stories, the decisions I'm proud of, the ones I'm not. If you're building anything yourself, especially on a shoestring with shared hosting, some of it might be useful. If you're just here for IT content, also fine.

If you want to know when it launches: drop your email on the get page and that's the only thing we'll send you.

Talk soon.