I run 3 things on a free GitHub board. It costs $0 and beats every paid tool I tried

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I used to keep my tasks in my head. Then in a text file. Then in a Notion page I never opened.

Then today I moved everything to GitHub Projects. Took about an hour. Cost $0.

3 things. ShutterAI (paid AI product), json-tool (free tool), and nicobuilt.com (this blog). 27 cards. 3 columns. Todo / In progress / Done.

That's it. One board. No subscription. No onboarding. It's been sitting in my GitHub account this whole time, I just never looked.

The trick: create the board on your account, not inside a repo. Then it survives anything. Delete a repo, the board stays. It's a second brain that can't die.

The second trick: one board for ALL your things. Prefix the cards:

[shutterai] cold start marketing
[json-tool] ship json tools
[nicobuilt.com] write blog posts
[ops] twitter growth

27 cards. 3 projects. Zero context switching. The prefix is the whole system.

And the third trick: give your AI the board token. I literally say "I finished X" and the card moves to Done by itself. I haven't dragged a card since I set it up.

But it wasn't all smooth. Classic indie hacker debugging session:

  • Fine-grained tokens lost Projects permission in 2026. Searched the list for 20 minutes. It's not there. It's not you.
  • The old REST API for projects? 404. Dead. Everything is GraphQL now.
  • Renaming a column wipes every card status. GitHub regenerates the IDs and doesn't remap. All 27 of my cards lost their column. I re-set them one by one. Do not do this.

So now I have one board, 27 cards, 13 done, 14 to go, and my entire business in one browser tab.

The best project management tool is the one you actually open.

Yours is probably already on your GitHub.

Follow me on X: @nico_built

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