Because you specifically are asking about "services", this is may be slightly off-topic, but I'd be interested in seeing a thread about open-source alternatives

Because you specifically are asking about "services", this is may be slightly off-topic, but I'd be interested in seeing a thread about open-source alternatives as well. When we were first starting out, we used a lot of these services and they were absolutely instrumental to get us going, allowing us to focus on what mattered at the time. But the more we developed our rhythm and workflow, the more we started constantly running up against small idiosyncrasies with each service that we were powerless to fix (we always submitted feedback, sometimes they'd implement our idea, sometimes they wouldn't). Maybe this app had an awesome interface, but their status labels were odd given the usual workflow. Maybe this other app was perfect in every way but had no API to allow us to tie it into the rest of our process. Anyway, we started switching from services to open-source products, which really allowed us to take our process to the next level and optimize everything specifically for our flow. For example (italics are open-source): --------------------- Project Management: Email => Basecamp => Pivotal => Redmine (and tried Asana but went back to Redmine) --------------------- Issue Tracking: Email => Github Issues => Redmine --------------------- Continuous Integration: CruiseControl => Integrity => TDDium (https://www.tddium.com https://www.tddium.com) / Semaphore (https://semaphoreapp.com https://semaphoreapp.com) --------------------- Error/Exception Tracking: ExceptionNotifier => Airbrake => Errbit --------------------- Time Tracking & Invoicing: Harvest => Cashboard (http://www.cashboardapp.com http://www.cashboardapp.com) --------------------- Group Chat: Campfire => [currently looking into] Kandan --------------------- Code Collaboration: Self-hosted SVN => Unfuddle => Github --------------------- Design Collaboration: Pixelapse => ConceptShare --------------------- You'll notice the only non-open-source services we still use are Github, Cashboard, TDDium/Semaphore, and ConceptShare. For the open-source services, we're able to host most of them on Heroku and rarely ever have to worry about maintaining them, other than security patches and whatnot. And we've been able to do some pretty cool things internally as far as connecting the different apps, since we have control over the APIs and underlying code, allowing us to add and change as needed. You'll also notice that for CI, we actually went in the opposite direction from open-source to service-based. I have an entire writeup (not yet published) on why I actually found CI to work best for us as a 3rd-party service.