2. Market Reality Check
Install counts, ratings and review counts were read from Marketplace listing pages on 30 Sept 2026. Per-user prices for the time-in-status apps were not visible (the pricing tables render dynamically) and are unverified. Only eazyBI's prices were verified. Re-check everything before quoting it externally. Sources are in research/10.
2.1 Who exactly is the buyer?
"Jira admins and PMOs" is two buyers with two different jobs. Split them by what they're trying to do and whether they have a budget and a deadline:
| Segment | What they want | Willingness to pay | Pain score (1–10) | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team leads and agile coaches wanting cycle time and bottlenecks | "Where does work get stuck?" | Low to moderate. Many use the free app or native reports. | 5. Useful, easily deferred. | Avoid as the lead segment. It's the most crowded search on the Marketplace. |
| PMOs wanting cross-project roll-ups and portfolio progress | Roll-up estimates, progress across projects, exec dashboards | Moderate to high, but they already use JXL, Structure, Jira Plans or a BI tool | 6. Real, but served. | Avoid. Different job, longer sale, strong incumbents. |
| Service desk managers wanting SLA reports | Time to first response, breaches, business hours | Moderate. JSM has native SLAs, and Appfire's Time to SLA has 3.4k installs. | 6 | Second segment later (approval-time and SLA evidence for audited service desks). |
| Jira admins and engineering or compliance leads at audited companies (SOC 2, ISO 27001, SOX, regulated industries) | "Prove to the auditor that every production change was approved, and by whom" | High when the audit is near. A failed control or a week of screenshots costs more than a year of the app. | 8 near the audit, 5 between audits | Best buyer. Deadline, budget, a clear job. The risk is seasonality. |
| Regulated-industry quality teams (medical devices, pharma: FDA 21 CFR Part 11) | Full audit trail, record integrity | High, but the bar is high (validation, vendor audits) | 8 | Real, but it's a heavier sale with validation paperwork. Later, if at all. |
Assumption: the idea as described serves all five. The feature that earns a price with a deadline (audit evidence) is the one buried last in the list. Pull it to the front.
Overall pain score for the product as described: 5/10. For the recommended audit-evidence version: 7/10, peaking at 8 around audits.
2.2 Competitors, category by category
Time in status and cycle time (the most crowded)
| App | Vendor | Installs | Rating (reviews) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Status Time Reports Free | Bloompeak | ~10.5k | 4.7 | Free. Leads by installs. There's also a paid version with ~1.3k installs. (Read from a Marketplace search page. Medium confidence.) |
| Time in Status | SaaSJet (Platinum Partner) | 5,322 | 4.5 (207) | Cloud Fortified, Runs on Atlassian. Standard and Advanced editions. Claims 5,000+ companies. Rovo agents. Updated 25 Sept 2026. |
| Timepiece – Time in Status | OBSS (Gold Partner) | 4,442 | 4.8 (270) | Cloud Fortified. Cloud, Server and DC. 15+ report types, AI assistant, scheduled reports, up to 1M issues per report. Updated 24 Sept 2026. |
| JXL – Sheets | Appfire | ~4.7k | 5.0 | Spreadsheet view with history columns, sum-ups and time in status. (Search page. Medium.) |
| Time in Status Reports | votazz | 1,461 | 4.5 (36) | Cloud Fortified. Power BI feed, median and 85th percentile. |
| Time in Status Report, Cycle & Lead Time | Broken Build (Gold) | 919 | 5.0 (10) | Cloud Fortified, SOC 2 Type 2. Adds "operational SLA" in Advanced. |
| Issue Time in Status | GTOLA | 863 | 5.0 (6) | Free, unsupported, last updated Feb 2024. |
| Others | Agilis LT, TypeSwitch, Colined, JiBrok, Tempo (Custom Charts) and more | 200–900 each | — | Tempo publishes a post arguing "there's almost a dozen" such apps and none are worth buying. |
Reading: 12+ apps, a free leader, two paid leaders with 200+ reviews each, and weekly release cadences (both leaders shipped a release in the last week of Sept 2026). A new generic entrant would be invisible.
SLA reporting
- Time to SLA (Appfire): ~3.4k installs, 4.8. (Search page. Medium.)
- JSM has native SLAs. Broken Build, SaaSJet and JiBrok sell SLA add-ons.
Cross-project roll-ups and portfolio reporting
- JXL (Appfire), Structure (Tempo), Pivot Report (Colined, ~910 installs), Dashboard Hub Pro (Appfire, ~3.1k).
- eazyBI for full BI. Verified pricing from 1 Dec 2025: $3.00/user/month for 1–100 users, $0.60 for 101–250, $0.25 for 251–1,000, $0.20 above 1,000.
- Jira Plans (formerly Advanced Roadmaps) natively on Premium and Enterprise. (Not re-verified in this run.)
Audit and issue history
| App | Vendor | Installs | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Issue History for Jira (Work Item History) | SaaSJet | 3,060 | 4.7 (95). Runs on Atlassian, Cloud Fortified, SOC 2. Exports XLSX, CSV and PDF or via API. Deleted-issue tracking and restore, sensitive-data scan. Markets HIPAA and FDA 21 CFR Part 11 compliance. |
| Issue History & Snapshots Reporter | CIFJ | not captured | Point-in-time snapshots, bulk CSV and Excel export, "audit and compliance" positioning. |
| Issue History Reports for Jira | not captured | not captured | Audit trail for compliance. |
Reading: "who changed what and when" is already sold, including with compliance language. What wasn't found in this run is an app that turns history into control evidence: approval by someone other than the implementer, skipped required steps, sampled changes per audit period, and an exceptions list. That's the gap. It's narrow, and an incumbent could close it quickly.
Native Jira
- Jira Cloud has an Average Time in Status gadget, but it only covers issues resolved in the last 30 days (secondary source, medium confidence). The Control Chart excludes non-working days but not non-working hours (OBSS, Feb 2026).
- Jira has no native change-control evidence report that was found in this run. Atlassian's org-level audit log covers admin events, not per-issue approval evidence. (Not verified in this run.)
- Risk: Atlassian's Rovo AI and Atlassian Analytics could answer more reporting questions natively over time. No specific announcement was verified.
Compliance automation platforms
Vanta, Drata and similar tools connect to Jira for tasks and some evidence. Their Jira change-management evidence depth was not verified in this run. If they already produce approval exceptions from Jira, the wedge narrows further. Check this in the first two weeks (see plans/08).
2.3 Vitamin or painkiller?
A vitamin as described, with one painkiller inside.
- Vitamins: time in status for team leads, roll-ups for PMOs, dashboards. Useful, and deferred whenever budget is tight. Free options exist.
- Painkiller: "Our SOC 2 auditor wants evidence that 25 sampled production changes were each approved by someone other than the engineer, and we have until Friday." Today this is screenshots, JQL and spreadsheets, days of an engineer's time, plus the risk of an exception finding.
- Test: if the app disappeared tomorrow, what would the customer lose? For a time-in-status report: a chart they can approximate with the free app. For audit evidence: days of work before the next audit, and the monthly early warning on control failures.
2.4 Market size: venture-scale, lifestyle, or a feature?
- Atlassian Marketplace totals and Jira Cloud customer counts were not verified in this run. They aren't needed for the decision.
- Bottom-up for the wedge: assume a few thousand audited companies run Jira Cloud and would pay
$80–300 a month for audit evidence. That's a software market in the low millions to low tens of millions of dollars a year. Capturing 250 sites is **$20k MRR**. All figures here are analyst estimates. - Category revenue proxy (illustrative, unverified): if a third of SaaSJet's 5,322 Time in Status installs paid ~$50 a month, that app alone would earn ~$90k MRR. It shows the category can support real revenue. It says nothing about a new entrant.
Answer: a lifestyle business, and a good one: small, profitable and low-overhead. It's not a venture market. Time-in-status on its own is a feature that Jira could absorb. Audit evidence is a niche product with a ceiling somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars of MRR for a single app.
2.5 Platform dependence matters more than you think
- Revenue share: 100% to you up to $1M lifetime Forge revenue (since 1 Jan 2026). Beyond it, Atlassian takes 16% from 1 Apr 2026 and 17% from 1 Oct 2026. Connect apps pay 20%, then 25%.
- Connect sunset: no new Connect apps since Sept 2025, and end of support on 31 Jan 2027. Every incumbent has to be on Forge. This removes a technical edge you might have had over Connect-era apps, and brings a wave of migrated competitors.
- Rate limits: points-based, enforced since 2 Mar 2026. By default, one 65,000-point hourly pool across all installs of your app. Per-tenant Tier 2 pools (up to 500,000 points/hour) need Atlassian review.
- Forge platform pricing: billing started 1 Jan 2026, with free monthly allowances. Atlassian can change these.
- Ranking and policy: Atlassian owns search, the listing rules, the badges and the payouts. There's no appeal channel of your own.