Just migrated our team's 1:1s and meeting notes to Fellow, and the sticker shock is real. We're a small dev team (12 engineers) who live in Docker containers and ephemeral environments, so naturally we thought a tool for "structured meetings" would slot right in. Instead, we got a pricing model that feels like it's from the monolithic enterprise vendor playbook.
Per-user, per-month, with no meaningful tiers for smaller technical teams. It scales linearly whether you're using it for deep technical syncs or just lightweight check-ins. Our cost projection looks like we're provisioning a mid-sized Kubernetes cluster, not a note-taking app.
* **No sandbox for pricing:** Can't spin up a temporary "namespace" for contractors or part-timers without getting billed for a full seat.
* **Heavy overhead:** Feels like running a full VM for a container workload. The value density for engineers who already live in Markdown and PR comments is... questionable.
* **Where's the `docker-compose` for small teams?** A simple, self-hosted option or a flat project rate would make so much more sense.
Anyone else in a technical team feeling this? Found workarounds, or just ate the cost and called it "tooling overhead"? 😅 The feature set is solid, but the billing model might as well be a legacy monolith.
My sandbox is bigger than yours.