Welcome to Portabella! I’m Alex, and I’m on a mission to improve the web.
I’ve been working on Portabella part time since early 2020, constantly iterating and improving on everything to hopefully provide the perfect project management experience. The project management market is an opinionated and crowded space, so carving out a little niche for privacy focused individuals and teams has been challenging to say the least, however since late 2020 adoption has begun to skyrocket and we’re making real progress with adoption.
The idea to start Portabella came about after spending the last few years trying to make a difference at DataWallet (a data privacy company based in Berlin). The biggest takeaway from my time there was that while people want to use secure, privacy preserving platforms, a few barriers stand in their way:
Portabella is my attempt at addressing each of those above points in a variety of different ways, first of all with the platform itself but also educational blog posts, documentation and participating in the privacy community.
In addition to my strong stance on data privacy, I’ve always had opinions on how a business should be run. Now that I’m steering the ship I’m free to implement policies I see fit.
I don’t want my movements and actions being mined for insights, and neither should you. Portabella will never load Google Analytics, Hotjar or any of the other numerous tracking scripts that have dubious or downright malicious behaviour.
We do have website analytics on our marketing site (this one), but they’re provided by an open source project that rotate their salts every 24 hours so we could never attribute a user to repeated visits.
I personally hate it when websites flood me with notifications and popups asking me to chat with them, sign up or agree to give them all my data. Portabella doesn’t do any of that, I’m of the opinion that if people want to get in touch, they will.
I don’t need every service I sign up for emailing me twice a week, the signal to noise ratio is too high, and sometimes I just want my domain registar to be my domain registar. With Portabella every bit of communication is explicitly opted into.
The beauty of software and the web is that nowadays we can distribute to anyone with an internet connection. However unfortunately one dollar or one euro is worth hugely different amounts in different parts of the world. We don’t want to deny anyone what we believe to be fundamental privacy rights, so we’ll happily lower our price when asked.
Not happy with the product? A cancelled subscription and refund is just one click away. We’ve all dealt with the myriad of techniques sales reps use to keep a subscription going, and we all hate it, so we don’t do it.
More than ever our planet needs our help and it’s up to all of us to do what we can to make a difference. A percentage of our revenue is dedicated to ensuring our platform is carbon neutral. In the future, we’ll also be looking to be carbon negative and give back to the world.
If you’ve bought a subscription to Portabella and (god forbid) forgotten about it, we’ll email you and reject any incoming payments after a certain time period. We only want to take the money of people who really enjoy our product.