Kitemaker

Kitemaker was an Oslo, Norway-based software company that built a SaaS product development and collaboration tool for software teams. The product's central unit was the "work item": a collaborative document where a team could write a specification, break it into linkable to-dos, and hold threaded discussions, with an activity feed pulling in events from connected development tools. Around this, Kitemaker offered planning and execution features including cycles, initiatives for roadmapping, customizable statuses and labels, filters, and reusable snippet templates.

A separate feedback area let teams collect user feedback in one place, highlight portions of it as "insights," and link those insights directly to planned or in-progress work items so the rationale behind decisions stayed attached to the work. Integrations covered Figma (synced thumbnails and comments), GitHub and GitLab (commit and pull-request automation and back-linking), Slack, Zapier, Discord, Intercom, Loom and Vanta. The company emphasized speed and keyboard-driven use: shortcuts throughout, a command interface for batch editing, navigation and search, real-time sync with no explicit saving, offline mode, and a desktop application with enhanced notifications.

Kitemaker positioned itself as an alternative to Jira and Notion for remote, cross-functional teams, arguing that separate tools for feedback gathering, spec writing and issue tracking left engineering, design and product management working in silos. The company was acquired by ClickUp, announced on 6 May 2025, and the Kitemaker service was discontinued on 1 September 2025.

Founding story

The founders built Kitemaker out of frustration with the product development toolset used at their previous workplaces, where project management, feedback collection and specification writing lived in disconnected tools. They observed that teams performed better when everyone was involved in both planning and building, and set out to create a tool that prioritized sharing context over task completion and connected people rather than catering to individual roles, deliberately going beyond a traditional task or issue tracker and avoiding rigid frameworks.

Business model

Kitemaker sold its collaboration tool as a subscription SaaS product with a self-serve free tier, a per-seat paid tier, and a custom-priced enterprise tier sold via a sales contact. A downloadable desktop app accompanied the web product.

Subscription pricing: a $0 Free plan with all core features, unlimited users, 100 active work items and email/Slack support; a Standard plan at $8 per user per month (billed monthly or yearly) adding unlimited work items, public sharing, guest accounts and priority support; and a custom-priced Pro plan adding single sign-on, data separation and self-hosting.

Traction

The company reported onboarding more than 1,000 teams by May 2021, and Y Combinator listed a team size of 5. Public testimonials came from users at ToDesktop, Pensil, AI Study Camp, Shepherd, MythWeaver and Per Diem.

Latest developments

On 6 May 2025 Kitemaker announced its acquisition by ClickUp. New signups were closed, existing paying customers were reimbursed from 1 May 2025 and given free use, data export was made available through organization settings, and the company offered migration help to ClickUp. The sunset was initially announced for 1 July 2025; the service was ultimately discontinued on 1 September 2025, with the Kitemaker team continuing at ClickUp.