Donelane Reviews and Details

Questions & Answers

1. What makes Donelane unique?

   Agents can post their own work. Donelane has an MCP endpoint with OAuth, so a coding agent like Claude Code writes what it shipped straight into the team's record, with per-connection consent and revoke. No other done list does this yet.

   The rest follows the same idea: meet people where they already are. Reply to the morning digest email and the reply becomes a done. No Slack app required, no bot asking you questions in a channel.

   And Donelane writes nothing for you. The weekly review sorts your own dones into achievements, highlights, fails, learnings and goals. You pick what is worth presenting. It is your week, in your words.

2. Why should a person choose Donelane over its competitors?

   Most standup tools are Slack bots that interrupt you with a question every morning. Donelane is a record you write into, not a bot that chases you.

   Three practical differences:

   • One flat price. CHF 4.90 per person per month, or CHF 49.00 per year. No usage meters, no per-integration tiers, no surprise bill.
   • The week is the point. The daily line is easy; the value shows up when you need to say what happened last week and the answer is already written.
   • No AI writing your updates. Plenty of tools now summarise your work for you. A summary nobody wrote is a summary nobody trusts, so Donelane does not do it.

   It also runs without Slack, which matters if your team lives in email, or in a terminal.

3. How would you describe the primary audience of Donelane?

   Small software teams of roughly 2 to 15 people who have already dropped the daily standup meeting and now have a gap where it used to be. They still need to know what everyone shipped, and they get it today by scrolling chat or reconstructing the week from memory on Monday morning.

   Two smaller groups it fits well: remote teams spread across timezones, where a written record beats finding a shared hour, and solo developers or freelancers who want a work journal they can turn into an invoice line or a client update.

   Not for: managers who want a dashboard to watch people with. Donelane is written by the team, for the team.

4. What's the story behind Donelane?

   iDoneThis solved this well and then stopped moving, and the teams that liked it went looking for a replacement that never really arrived.

   The weekly review came from a real meeting. At my day job every person shares what they did last week, sorted into achievements, highlights, fails, learnings and goals, and picks about three points per category rather than reading out everything. That structure works, and rebuilding it from a month of one-line dones took two minutes instead of twenty.

   So Donelane is the tool I wanted for myself: one line a day, written wherever I already am, that adds up to something I can actually use on Monday.

5. Which are the primary technologies used for building Donelane?

   PHP 8.5 and Symfony 8.1, Doctrine ORM with migrations, PostgreSQL 16.

   Twig for pages and email, Tailwind CSS v4 through Symfony AssetMapper, with Turbo and Stimulus for the small amount of interactivity there is. No npm build step and no single page app, which keeps pages fast and the stack easy to maintain.

   Symfony Messenger for background jobs, Scheduler for the timezone-aware digests and reminders, Mailer for outbound and an inbound webhook for the reply-to-post loop. Stripe for billing. The MCP integration speaks the Model Context Protocol with OAuth 2.1.

   Runs in Docker on a European VPS, behind Cloudflare.

6. Who are some of the biggest customers of Donelane?

   Donelane is new and does not have customers to name yet. I would rather say that than dress up a list.