How it all started
Before we give you a glimpse into the future of trakked, we would like to briefly review the history of trakked with you. It didn't start in our garage, but with the idea and the desire to create an internal tool that could offload some of the work related to handling our maintenance contracts and enable us to monitor our systems. We also wanted to get an automated overview of all installations and finally say goodbye to our tediously kept Excel lists. Talking to other agencies and freelancers at various Contao events, we noticed that we share this common need.
In the next step, we developed a monitoring tool that can be used by everyone. To make it as easy as possible for everyone to set it up, we decided on a cloud-based solution.
At the Contao Conference 2018 in Salzburg, the first version of trakked was announced.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our loyal customers and thank them for their feedback and the many suggestions for improvements.
In order for as many people as possible to benefit from trakked, we set our price very low. Unfortunately, in retrospect, this calculation did not work out for us. Although we had a great product, we lacked the budget for sensible marketing and also the possibility to work on your requests and implement new features.
Back to the future
As we realised in 2020 that not only the development costs but also the operating costs exceeded our income, we sat down and had to make an important decision: How should we continue with trakked, do we dare a new start or does trakked have to face its EOL.
A bit of additional background: we personally invest a lot of time in Contao and Open Source, be it in the core development of Contao, the development of the Contao Manager, the development of over 100 extensions, in writing the Contao documentation or in improving our ecosystem (e.g. pull requests for Composer).
We quickly agreed that we had to continue with trakked, but it was also clear to us that in order to be future-proof and not have another "open source" project on our hands, we had to adjust our pricing and change our strategy.
We welcome a new member to the team
To ensure we get new ideas and also to better cover the topic of marketing, we were able to win Christian Feneberg for our team. You may know Christian as the owner of the Contao Academy and as one of the hosts of the Contao Show on Contao TV. He has been an enthusiastic customer of trakked ever since the beginning and was also very interested in seeing the project continue. Welcome, Christian!
Cobbler, stick to your last!
Until now, the goal was to monitor various systems with trakked. However, we lacked the necessary experience in implementing other systems such as Matomo, WordPress, TYPO3 or Drupal. As Contao specialists, we are are now refocussing on our strengths and want to provide a great tool for Contao.
A limitation is the technical foundation and the billing system. This made the integration of new features very cumbersome and it did not seem to make any sense to do so in the current version. Therefore, we are freeing ourselves from old burdens and are developing a brand-new trakked for you!
What you can expect with trakked 2.0
First of all: trakked remains a cloud solution. However, it also means letting go of old things, because we are focusing exclusively on Contao. In the future, you will no longer be able to automatically track external systems such as Matomo, but thanks to the new filter functions, they can still be listed or managed in trakked and no changes regarding the uptime monitoring are to be expected.
We have listened to our customers and are enhancing trakked with important new features, such as filtering and assigning individual tags for a better overview, so you can also display information about the web hosting of your installations in trakked in the future. Furthermore, we will provide you with more Contao relevant data. You will find out more about this in the next few weeks.
In addition to managing installations themselves, we will also provide you with knowledge and practical experience in the future. Our main focus will be how you can earn money with monitoring and Contao updates, because a CMS needs to be maintained (in Germany this is even required by law). We will give you arguments on how to sell Contao maintenance contracts to your customers. We also give you an insight into our workflow and show you how you can make your daily work easier and save time.
