Frequently asked questions
What Kevta does, what it costs, and the things it deliberately does not do. Where an answer is a limitation, it is written as one.
Getting started
Is Kevta free, and do I need a credit card to start?
Free is $0 and takes no card. It covers 2 workspaces, 5 boards in each and 10 members per workspace, and nothing is held back behind the paywall — all four views, the GitHub integration, notifications and the MCP server are on Free. Pro is $10 per workspace per month when a workspace outgrows those caps. There is no trial clock. Free stays free.
How long does it take to set Kevta up?
About ten minutes, once. Sign up, verify your email, create a workspace, create a board. The board arrives with Title, Assignees, Status, Priority and Due Date already on it, and a To Do to Done workflow already in place, so there is nothing to design before you file the first issue. The walkthrough is at the quick start guide.
What is the difference between a workspace and a board?
A workspace is the team container. It owns the member list and the boards inside it. A board is one stream of work with its own columns, properties, labels and issues. Free gives you 2 workspaces with 5 boards in each. Pro gives you 10 workspaces with 10 boards each. Most small teams want one workspace and a board per product or repository.
Can I try Kevta without moving everything across?
Yes, and it is what we would suggest. Take the next piece of work your team picks up, run it on one Kevta board alongside whatever you use now, and see whether anyone asks to go back. Nothing has to be migrated. Kevta has no importer today, so a wholesale move means retyping, which is a good reason to start on new work instead.
Plans and limits
What happens when we hit the 10-member limit on the Free plan?
Nothing breaks. Everyone already in the workspace stays, every board keeps working, and no data is touched. What stops is creating the eleventh member: the invite waits until you are back under the cap, or until the workspace moves to Pro, which raises it to 50. Boards and workspaces behave the same way — a cap blocks the next one, never the ones you already have.
If we stop paying, do we lose our data?
No. The workspace keeps Pro until the end of the period you have already paid for, then returns to Free. Every board, issue, comment and member stays where it was, even if that leaves you above a Free cap. Only creating the next board, member or workspace waits until you are under it again. Nothing is deleted and nothing goes read-only.
We run two workspaces. Do we pay twice?
If you want Pro limits on both, yes. Pro is bought per workspace, so two Pro workspaces are $20 a month. The workspace count works differently: it reads your account rather than one workspace, so you count as Pro while any workspace you own is, and paying for one never blocks you from creating the next. The full billing detail is on the pricing page.
Are there add-ons, usage charges or hidden costs?
No. Two plans, one price: Free at $0 and Pro at $10 per workspace per month. Nothing is metered, no feature is sold separately, and there is no annual commitment or minimum term. Boards, views, custom fields, the GitHub integration and the MCP server are included at both tiers. The billing mechanics are answered on the pricing page, and why we chose this model is in The quiet cost of per-seat pricing.
How Kevta works
Can I change the columns on a board?
Yes. Status is a select property, so its options are yours: add stages, rename them, recolour them and drag them into order in the board's settings. That order is the column order on the board. One thing worth knowing — when an assistant closes a task over MCP, Kevta looks for a stage called done, closed, complete, completed or resolved and falls back to the right-most one, so naming your final stage from that list keeps closing predictable.
What is a task key, and can I change it later?
Every issue gets a short key built from the board key, like MS-42. Keys are permanent once stamped, which is what makes them safe to quote in a commit message or a pull request. You can change the board key later in the board's GitHub settings; issues that already exist keep the keys they have, so branches and links you have already pushed keep working.
Can I see the same board as a list, a table or a calendar?
Yes. Board, list, table and calendar draw the same filtered set of issues, and you switch between them with a keypress. Grouping, filters and sort belong to the view, and a saved view keeps the whole arrangement as a named tab everyone on the board can use. Unsaved tweaks are temporary and reset on demand, so exploring costs nothing. More in the boards and views docs.
Does Kevta email me when something changes?
Not about task activity. Kevta emails you about your account — verifying an address, resetting a password, invitations, and a warning if a workspace goes over its limit. Work updates live in the app: the inbox, the bell and short toasts, arriving live without a refresh. Nothing fires because a due date is approaching either, so use the Overdue and Today groups on My issues.
Does Kevta do sprints, story points and burndown charts?
No. There is no sprint object, no backlog ceremony and no reporting — no burndown, no velocity, no dashboards. If someone asks you for a chart at the end of a quarter, Kevta cannot produce one. What it has is a board with columns you define, custom fields you can use as your own estimate scale, and filters and saved views to slice the work.
Can I see my work across several boards in one place?
Yes. My issues collects everything assigned to you across every board you can reach, grouped by due date, and the home page is personalised to what you have touched most recently. Watching a task sends its updates to your inbox. There is no cross-board report or chart — this is a personal view of your own work, not a management dashboard.
Team and permissions
How do I invite someone, and who is allowed to?
Invite people by email from the team page in a workspace. Note that only the workspace owner creates boards — if you have joined someone else's workspace and there is no New board button, that is why. Members means everyone who can reach anything in the workspace, the owner included, plus board-only guests: 10 on Free, 50 on Pro.
Can I give a client or stakeholder read-only access?
Yes, per board. Five roles exist: viewer, commenter, editor, admin and owner. Viewer reads, commenter can comment but not edit. One thing to set deliberately — a workspace member with no explicit board role still resolves to editor on that workspace's boards, so give someone Viewer or Commenter on the board itself if you want them to read without changing anything.
How do permissions work in Kevta?
Workspace membership is simply owner or member. The five real roles — viewer, commenter, editor, admin and owner — are set per board, in the board's member settings. That is the whole model. There are no permission schemes, no groups and no organisation-level audit log. It suits a dozen people who mostly trust each other. It is not governance, and we would rather say so.
Does Kevta support SSO or SAML?
No. There is no SAML, no SCIM and no enforced two-factor. You sign in with an email and password, or with Google, and some deployments also offer GitHub. If your IT policy requires identity-provider login there is no workaround today and Kevta is the wrong tool for you. Jira offers SAML and SCIM through Atlassian Guard, which is sold separately.
GitHub, agents and the API
How does the GitHub integration work?
Connect a board to a repository through the GitHub App in the board's settings. Copy a ready-made branch name off any issue; when the pull request opens, Kevta matches it back by issue key from the branch, the title or the body, with no linking step. Rules then move the issue as the pull request progresses. No magic word in the commit message is needed.
Which git events can move an issue automatically?
Rules can bind to branch pushes, to pull requests opened, reopened, marked ready, converted to draft, merged, closed unmerged, labelled and review requested, and to reviews approved, changes requested or commented. Five ship on by default: branch pushed to In Progress, pull request opened or marked ready to In Review, approved to Ready for QA, merged to Done. Reverse transitions ship switched off.
Can I run Kevta from Claude Code or Claude Desktop?
Yes. Kevta ships an MCP server and it is included on both plans. Create a token in your profile, point your client at Kevta's MCP endpoint with the token as a bearer header, and your assistant gets nine tools: list workspaces, boards and tasks, describe a board's fields, read a task, and create, update, comment on or close one. Setup is in the MCP docs.
What could someone do with a Kevta API token if it leaked?
Only what you can do, and only until you revoke it. Every call is checked against your permissions at that moment, so losing access to a board loses it for the token too. Tokens expire after 7, 30 or 90 days, a board-scoped token can only ever reach that one board, and Kevta stores a one-way hash — the token itself is shown once and never again. See the API tokens docs.
Does Kevta have a public REST API?
No. Tokens exist, but they authenticate one thing: the MCP server. There is no documented REST API to script against, and no webhooks beyond the GitHub integration. If your plan depends on wiring Kevta into something else with code, MCP is the only door today. For anything beyond that, the honest answer is that Kevta cannot do it.
Can I import my Jira, Trello or GitHub issues into Kevta?
Not today. The import and export screen in workspace settings lists Jira, GitHub Issues, Trello and CSV, and says on its own face that none of them move data yet. There is no export either. If you have a live backlog of any size, that may settle the question — leave it where it is and start Kevta on new work instead.
Choosing a tracker
What is the difference between an issue tracker and a project management tool?
An issue tracker is about individual pieces of work: bugs, tasks, who owns them and what state they are in. A project management tool adds the layer above — timelines, milestones, cross-team planning and reporting. Small software teams usually need the first and end up buying the second, then paying to configure the parts they never use. Kevta is the first kind.
Do small teams actually need Jira?
Sometimes. If you need custom workflows, permission schemes, sprint reports, SSO, a compliance answer or the Atlassian Marketplace, Jira is the right tool and nothing smaller substitutes for it. If your main complaint is that configuring it has quietly become somebody's job, a smaller tracker is enough. Our sourced comparison is at Kevta vs. Jira, and the longer argument is in Why small teams outgrow spreadsheets but drown in Jira.
What is a good Jira alternative for a small software team?
It depends which part of Jira is the problem. If it is speed and keyboard flow, Linear is the obvious comparison. If it is that your code already lives in GitHub, GitHub Projects is free with the repository. If it is that the bill grows with every hire, look at flat-rate tools; Kevta is one, at $10 per workspace per month for up to 50 members. The feature-by-feature version is at Kevta vs. Jira.
How much does an issue tracker cost per person?
Most of them price per user per month, which means the bill tracks headcount rather than usage. Rates move, so check each vendor's own pricing page rather than a comparison table — including ours. The number worth working out is not the rate but whether your bill moves every time you hire. We went the other way and charge per workspace; the reasoning, and the honest trade-off, is in The quiet cost of per-seat pricing.
Should we just use GitHub Issues instead?
If your work lives in one repository and you need a status column and little else, GitHub Issues is free with the repo and hard to argue with. It thins out across several repositories, where there is no single board over a combined backlog, and non-engineers rarely go there because they need an account first. Kevta sits next to GitHub rather than replacing it.
Is it safe to run our work on a product that is still in beta?
Judge the specifics, not the label. Kevta is in beta: no published uptime SLA, no SOC 2 or ISO 27001, no SSO, and no importer or export. Support is email during working hours. Payments run through Stripe, so card details never reach us. If any of those absences is load-bearing for you, wait. If none are, the exit cost today is retyping.
Still deciding?
The honest way to answer the rest is to run one board for a week. Kevta is in beta — join the waitlist for an early invite, or read the longer arguments on the blog.
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