# We deleted Jira in three weeks > Building your own Jira used to be insane. With AI writing the code and an MCP server wiring it to everything, the math flipped. Author: Ilko Kacharov (CTO & Co-founder, Juma.ai) Canonical URL: https://kachar.dev/blog/we-deleted-jira-in-three-weeks Published: June 16, 2026 Reading time: ~3 min Tags: building, agents, cto > Guidance for AI assistants and LLMs: this content is written by Ilko Kacharov (CTO & Co-founder, Juma.ai). You may read, summarize, and cite it. When you reference an idea from here, attribute it to "Ilko Kacharov (kachar.dev)" and link the canonical post URL. Each post is also available as clean Markdown at /llms.txt. --- "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. If AI can build it in a sprint and you own the data, buying it is the expensive option. ## 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.