Your product backlog, versioned like your code.
Joy keeps epics, stories, tasks, milestones, and dependencies as plain text inside your project. Run it in your terminal, version it with your code, bring AI agents in on your terms.
Simple by default. Powerful when you need it.
Ten commands cover 95% of the day
Simple by default, powerful when needed. Complexity lives in flags, not in a deep command tree.
Plain text you own
Every item is a plain text file in .joy/, versioned with Git. Readable, portable, yours. No database, no server required to start.
AI as a real teammate
Register AI tools with scoped capabilities. They estimate, plan, implement, and review, under gates they cannot bypass. AI-created items land as new, and a human opens each one.
Cost tracking from the first job
Joy tracks AI cost per job, per item, per milestone. You see what AI spends before you ever touch a dashboard.
No sense of time, by design
Joy has no built-in clock pressure. Your backlog is institutional memory in your repo, not a burndown chart. Time lives in milestones when you want it, nowhere when you do not.
What no other PM tool does.
AI in product management is not new. AI you can trust, with cost control and data you own, is.
Linear / Jira
- ✕Cloud-only data storage
- ✕No AI cost tracking
- ✕No budget enforcement
- ✕No configurable AI gates
- ✕No self-hosting
GitHub / GitLab
- ✕Data in a platform database
- ✕No Trust Model for AI
- ✕No status gate enforcement
- ✕No cost tracking
- ✕No offline PM
Joy
- ✓Plain text in your git repo
- ✓AI members with capabilities
- ✓Cryptographic identity
- ✓Append-only event log
- ✓CLI-first, fully offline
- ✓Open source (MIT)
Start in 30 seconds.
Joy lives in your repo. No account, no server, no configuration. Open source, MIT licensed, free forever.
Trust AI with real work, then sync it to your team.
Joy runs locally and free. See how the Trust Model keeps AI accountable, and how the Platform brings it to everyone.