Plainwork / Catalogue / Switch Brief
Choose the tool to switch to, with the facts checked
Name the dev or small-team tool you want to leave and what the replacement must do. Within 24 hours get a sourced, dated brief: knockout tests, 3 candidates plus staying put, costs, switching effort and a trial plan.
- Your must-haves turned into pass or fail tests, with any assumption marked
- A knockout matrix of 3 candidates plus staying put: every cell has a verdict, a source number and a fetch date, and says so when it is our inference
- Price, free limits, licence and latest release date for each (N/A for hosted services), read from live public pages, with the fetch date
- Cost arithmetic at your team size and volume, line by line
- Switching effort, what you lose, and how you would leave the new tool
- A 2-week trial plan with a pass or fail measure for each step, ending in a fallback
- A 'could not establish' list: every unknown stated, never guessed
- Delivered on your order page and by email within 24 hours
Sample brief (invented, modelled on a real Ask HN question): a six-person team on GitHub Actions that wants CI to keep working during GitHub outages, at most $100 a month more, with runners it controls. Facts read from vendor pages on 2026-10-12. Read the full result.
The answer first. (1) Changing the CI tool alone cannot make CI independent of GitHub while the repositories stay there: Woodpecker, for example, documents GitHub as a forge using an OAuth app. Only moving the repos to another forge removes the dependency. (2) The price pressure is currently gone: GitHub's billing page says "GitHub Actions usage is free for self-hosted runners", and the planned charge was postponed, not cancelled. (3) Hosted routes fail a six-person team on size or budget: Buildkite Free is "Up to 5 users", GitLab.com Free is "5 users per top-level group" (a private namespace over five users goes read-only), GitLab.com Premium for six is 6 × $29 = $174 and Buildkite Pro is 6 × $30 = $180. (4) Forgejo and self-managed GitLab Free both pass the first three tests; the sample trials Forgejo because it can fall back to reading .github/workflows, while its docs say Actions is "not designed to be compatible".
Knockout matrix: eight candidates including staying put, four tests, 32 cells. Each cell reads PASS, FAIL, PARTIAL or UNKNOWN with a numbered source, and says "by inference" where it is our reasoning from the cited page. The result also lists licence and latest release date for each self-hosted candidate ("N/A, hosted SaaS" for the others), and how to leave Forgejo.
What we could not establish (an excerpt): whether issues and pull requests can leave Forgejo for a non-Forgejo tool, which licence covers a self-managed GitLab Free install, and CircleCI credits for this build mix. The full result also has cost lines, a Forgejo trial plan with pass criteria, and 21 dated sources.
Made for
Who it's for
Starts from your list
Your must-haves become pass or fail tests, so options that fail on team size, budget or hosting are removed with the reason shown.
Every fact has a source and a date
Prices, limits, licences and release dates are read from live pages on the delivery date and linked, so you can check any figure in a click. Where a figure cannot be read, it says UNKNOWN.
Staying put is a candidate
If the reason you wanted to leave no longer holds, the brief says so instead of selling you a migration.
Honest about unknowns
What could not be read or confirmed is listed once, plainly, so you know what to ask the vendor.
How it works
From checkout to done
Buy
Pay securely with Stripe
Open
Submit the tool you are leaving, why, and your must-haves on the order page
Use
Get the brief on the page and by email within 24 hours
Questions
Good to know
Why pay when I can ask a chatbot?
You can, and for a quick idea you should. This is for when a wrong answer costs days: a fixed method, your constraints applied as pass or fail tests, a source URL and fetch date on every figure, staying put evaluated, and the unknowns listed. It is still AI-written, so check the figures you rely on against the linked pages.
What tools can you cover?
Developer and small-team software with public pricing or docs: CI, hosting, mail, auth, forms, analytics, monitoring, project tools, AI coding tools and similar. One tool per order.
Do you run or open anything I send?
No. The work is reading public vendor pages, docs, licences and release records. Nothing you supply is installed, built or run, and we never ask for access to your accounts or repositories.
Is this security, legal or compliance advice?
No. Where data location or certifications matter, the brief quotes what the vendor states, attributes it and tells you to verify with the vendor.
How current are the facts?
Read from the live pages on the day of delivery, with the fetch date on each source. Plans change, so re-check before you commit.
What if the brief cannot be done?
If it cannot be answered from public pages, or it asks for something we do not do, you are told why and can ask for a refund under the refund policy.
Can you always find the price at my scale?
Not always. Some vendors publish prices only inside an interactive calculator or a script-built page. We read the page source and structured data first, then help-centre pages; if the figure at your scale still cannot be read, we give the nearest published tier with its quote and mark the rest UNKNOWN, never a guess.
What if it doesn't work for me?
If it doesn't work as described or you can't access it, email us within 14 days and we'll fix it or refund you. See the refund policy for details.
Switch Brief
A sourced replacement brief for the dev tool you want to leave: your must-haves as tests, dated prices and licences, in 24 hours.
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