monday.com

So what is monday.com? Picture a spreadsheet where every row is a job and every column says something about it: who's on it, when it's due, whether it's done or stuck. Now make the status cells bright green, orange and red.

That's a board, and you can make one for anything. A product launch, a hiring pipeline, a client list. One App Store reviewer runs a diesel repair shop on it.

People pick it up fast. Want a new column? Hit the plus. Want that row somewhere else? Drag it.

Then it starts doing chores for you. Automations are little rules like "when the due date arrives, email the owner". No code.

On top sit dashboards, docs and forms. And lately a lot of AI: an assistant called Sidekick, agents and a meeting notetaker.

The pricing is a puzzle. You don't buy seats one at a time. You pick a team size, and the smallest paid one is three. So a team of two pays for a seat nobody sits in.

The plan names hide things, too. Basic sounds like enough, but timelines, Gantt charts, the calendar view, automations and integrations all start on Standard. Time tracking and private boards wait for Pro.

Automations are counted. Standard gives you 250 actions a month. Pro jumps to 25,000.

AI runs on credits, from 1,000 a month on Basic to 3,000 on Pro. Run out and you buy more.

And the phone app is the weaker half. Reviewers say it looks different from the website and can't edit automations.

Free covers two seats, three boards and three docs. Good for one person finding their feet.

Basic is $9 a seat a month on yearly billing. You get unlimited items and free viewers, and not a lot else.

Standard is $12 a seat. It's the one most teams want, because that's where timelines, the calendar, guests, automations and integrations turn up. Pro is $19 and adds time tracking and private boards.

Don't forget the three-seat minimum. Three seats on Standard is $36 a month, paid for the year up front.

One odd line on the bill: the AI credits are priced at $10 per 1,000 a month, then cancelled out by a "special offer" of the same amount. Worth watching.

Paying yearly saves 18%, going by their pricing FAQ. We'd look at ClickUp before paying, where $7 a person gets Gantt charts and time tracking.

monday.com has 4.8 on the App Store from about 48,000 ratings. That's ahead of ClickUp, Asana and Trello.

What do the fans say? That it works the way you'd guess. One convert's only real complaint is the name.

And it isn't just office teams. The diesel repair shop went through about 25 other programs before this one stuck. Another reviewer and their husband run a house renovation on it.

The complaints are about money and the phone. A two-person business liked the tool and still gave it one star over the three-seat minimum. A designer says the app's layout doesn't match the website.

Hacker News hardly mentions it. When its name comes up, it's as the sort of software people reckon teams will soon build for themselves with AI.