We deleted Jira in three weeks

"Build vs buy" was settled a decade ago. You buy. Building your own issue tracker was a punchline, a thing only doomed startups did on their way to running out of money. We built ours in three weeks and it was the best infrastructure decision we made this year.

The tool is called Jumira. We are Juma, so the name wrote itself. It started as a Jira replacement. It did not stay one.

The old math said don't

The reason "build your own Jira" was a joke is that the build cost dwarfed the license cost. A team of engineers burning weeks to rebuild what Atlassian sells for a few dollars per seat is obviously stupid. That math was correct for fifteen years.

It is not correct anymore. AI writes most of the code now. The work that used to take a quarter takes a sprint. When the build cost collapses, every "just buy it" decision is suddenly worth re-running. Most teams have not re-run it. They are still quoting the old answer to a question that changed.

It ate the other tabs too

We did not just replace Jira. We replaced Miro, because Jumira has timelines and an idea-capture board. We folded in the parts of three other tools we actually used and dropped the parts we never touched.

The thing nobody sells you is coherence. Every SaaS tool is its own tab, its own login, its own half-broken integration with the next one. Owning the whole surface means one UI, one design language, one source of truth. We own the feeling of the thing, and we can change it on a Tuesday.

The MCP server is the real unlock

Jumira runs an MCP server. That is the part that makes it more than a cheaper Jira.

Paste a ticket link into Claude Code and the agent reads it straight from the MCP server. It investigates, iterates, leaves comments, builds checklists, attaches what it finds. When a task finishes, it updates its own status. There is a page for my open pull requests. I create tickets from a PR, attach tickets to the PR I am on, and watch the GitHub Actions status without leaving the app.

No vendor was ever going to build that for us. It is too specific to how we work. That is the whole point.

You own the data, and that is the prize

The license fee was never the real cost. The real cost was your workflow living in someone else's database, on someone else's roadmap, behind someone else's API limits.

In an era where every workflow is becoming an agent surface, the data and the integration points are the asset. Renting them out means the most valuable layer of how your team works belongs to a vendor. We pulled it back. Our processes are ours, our data is ours, and the next feature we need ships in days because there is nobody to ask.

We are a team of builders. So we built the tool we work inside. Turns out the joke was on everyone still paying rent.

Glossary

Tools

Claude Code

Anthropic's agentic coding tool that reads a codebase, edits files and runs commands, in the terminal, IDEs, a desktop app and the web.

GitHub Actions

GitHub's built-in automation service for running build, test and deploy workflows from a repository.

Jira

Atlassian's project and issue tracking tool, where teams plan work, track progress and collaborate in a shared system.

Juma

A collaborative AI workspace for marketing teams. It holds brand profiles, knowledge and projects, and produces on-brand decks, reports and images from them.

Jumira

Juma's internal project tracker, built to replace Jira. It has timelines and an idea-capture board, and runs an MCP server.

MCP

Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI applications to external data sources, tools and workflows.

Miro

A collaborative online whiteboard for diagramming, planning and brainstorming, where teams work together on a shared canvas.