Building Dubuku: A Deliberately Small Alternative to Jira
Published on: Sep 20 2026
By: Krishnan Sethuraman
We were paying enterprise prices for enterprise features we never touched. So instead of upgrading, I spent two weeks building the alternative — a project management tool with a fraction of Jira's footprint and none of its bill. Here's why subtraction beat addition, and what happened when I handed the rest of the roadmap to Claude Code.