The short answer
You need three things: somewhere work items live, somewhere decisions are written down, and somewhere code lives with its history. Free tiers cover all three comfortably for a small team.
Which product you pick matters much less than whether everyone actually uses it, and whether decisions stop happening in direct messages.
What each one is for
| Need | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Work items | One list, one status, one owner per item |
| Decisions | Written with the reasoning, findable later |
| Code | Version control you own, with history |
| Conversation | Channels rather than direct messages |
| Files | One place, not attachments in chat |
The decisions row is the one most teams lack. Code shows what was done; almost nothing records why, and that is the expensive gap when someone new arrives.
Own the accounts
Version control, issue tracking and documentation should be under your organisation's account with contributors invited, not under a developer's personal account.
- Repositories in your organisation, not an individual's namespace
- You hold the administrator role
- You can remove access yourself
- Backups or exports you can produce without asking
This costs nothing to set up correctly at the start and is awkward to unpick later, particularly if a relationship ends badly.
Habits beat tools
- Every piece of work has an item, even small ones.
- Decisions get written where they can be found, not only said.
- Conversations happen in channels rather than direct messages.
- The documentation is updated as part of the change, not afterwards.
- Someone prunes stale items periodically.
Point five is what keeps the system usable. A backlog of four hundred items nobody will ever do makes the twenty that matter invisible.
When free stops being enough
Usually at team size, private repository limits, or when you need permissions finer than the free tier offers. For a small business working with a few developers, free tiers go a long way.
Upgrade when a limit actually blocks you rather than pre-emptively. The features that justify paid plans are mostly about scale and administration.