The AURORA Way · 7 principles
We're building the workspace
we wanted ourselves.
Most project managers were designed for a knowledge worker sitting at a desk in a 50-person office. AURORA is for the other 95% of us — the dev shops, the indie SaaS, the freelancers who ship between trains and meetings. Here's how we build.
01
GitHub is the source of truth. Everything else is a view.
Your code lives in GitHub. Your issues live in GitHub. Your history lives in GitHub. AURORA reads and writes there. If GitHub goes down, your data isn't locked in our database — it's where it should be.
We don't replicate GitHub. We don't fork it. We're the layer on top that makes it usable for the part of your team that isn't in IDEs all day.
02
The phone is not a second screen. It's the first screen.
The work happens at 9 p.m. on the couch. In the metro at 8 a.m. In the taxi to the client. In the queue for coffee. Most project managers treat mobile as an afterthought — a stripped web view that breaks the moment you go offline.
We build mobile-first. If a feature can't be used on a 6-inch screen with a single thumb, we don't ship it. Push notifications. Offline-first. Installable PWA. This is the bar.
03
Small teams ship better than big ones. We build for them.
AURORA is for 1 to 15 people. Not 50. Not 500. Not the Fortune 500. We don't do custom SAML claims. We don't do 6-month enterprise sales cycles. We don't ship features that only matter at 200 users.
If you grow past us, you'll outgrow us — and that's okay. We'd rather serve a hundred thousand small teams beautifully than fifty contracts badly.
04
Your data is yours. Always. Provably.
Every feature ships with an export. Markdown. JSON. One-click. Tier-locked exports are a moral failure. The EU Data Act made this a legal obligation in September 2025 — we've always treated it as one.
Self-host AURORA on your own server with the AGPL Community Edition. Your database, your backups, your control. We make money from people who'd rather not deal with that — and we keep the bridge open in both directions.
05
The AI helps you. It doesn't bill you twice.
AI is included in every paid plan with quotas. Triage suggestions. Thread summaries. Daily digests. None of this costs extra. We saw what ClickUp Brain at $9/mo on top of ClickUp at $7/mo does to user trust, and we're not playing that game.
On self-host, bring your own Anthropic or OpenAI key. The same features, your bill. We don't middleman the LLM.
06
Speed is a feature. Slowness is a bug.
Sub-100ms perceived TTI on every action. Optimistic UI everywhere. Aggressive prefetch. Cmd+K opens in 8ms. If a click feels slow, it's a P0 bug — not a "performance roadmap item."
Jira takes 1.5 to 3 seconds to load a board. Monday slows to a crawl past a thousand items. Notion mobile is unusable at ten thousand rows. None of these are acceptable. None of these will happen here.
07
Built in public. Priced in public. Roadmapped in public.
Our changelog is public. Our roadmap is public. Our pricing is on a single page — no "contact sales for pricing" for plans humans can actually use. Our metrics (MRR, customers, churn) are shared in our newsletter every month.
Trust is the only moat that compounds. We earn it the only way it can be earned: by showing the work.