START TESTING IS LIVE I Almost Quit Building Start Testing. Now It Is Live.

START TESTING IS LIVE

I Almost Quit Building Start Testing. Now It Is Live.

Start Testing is live. I have been trying to get to that sentence for years. There were days I wanted to quit. There were days I was not confident at all. I looked at everything this platform needed to do and thought, honestly, I do not know if I can pull this off.

Platforms like this are normally built by huge teams. Product managers. Designers. Frontend and backend engineers. QA teams. Accessibility teams. Support teams. Techopolis is a team of two, but I am the developer who built Start Testing. One developer took this from an idea to a real platform that people can sign up for and use today. Our two-person team got it across the finish line, and I am proud of that. But I did not build Start Testing just to prove that we could. I built it because I needed it.

I knew what good felt like

Years ago, I worked as an accessibility tester at a company that had a real platform for the work. The project was there. The issues were there. The assignments, comments, history, and fixes were all in one place. I did not have to spend my day figuring out where the work went. I could test. Then I left, and I lost access to that platform. Suddenly I was back in documents and spreadsheets. Every project had its own pile of files. I was trying to remember what I found, what I told the client, what had been fixed, and what was still sitting there waiting for somebody.

I hated it. I was doing real accessibility and QA work, but too much of my time was going into managing the mess around the work. I tried other tools. I tried other ways of organizing it. Nothing fit the way I actually worked. So I started building the platform I wanted to use.

Getting here was not easy

I wish I could tell you I had one great idea, built it once, and everything worked. That is not what happened. There have been a lot of late nights and a lot of early mornings. I would go to bed thinking about a problem, wake up thinking about the same problem, and get right back to work. I wanted to make this as close to perfect as I could before I asked other people to trust it with their work.

I spent about three years trying versions of this. I built things I thought I would love, used them for real work, and threw them away. This version took about a year to become Start Testing. Some days it felt like we were making real progress. Other days I would look at how much was still left and wonder whether one developer on a two-person team had any business attempting something this big. I was not always confident. I did not always think I could do it. But we kept going.

We use Start Testing every day. It is where we track the work at Techopolis, so we cannot hide from bad decisions. If something is confusing or slow, we have to live with it too, and then I have to fix it. Start Testing even tracks its own problems. When the platform has an error, the logs go back into Start Testing and an issue is filed in our project. The platform tells us when something has gone wrong inside the platform itself, and that problem enters the same workflow our customers use.

I love that. We are not guessing how Start Testing works under pressure. We are using it to build Start Testing. That is how I know this is not just a collection of features that looked good on a sales page. It is a platform built inside real development work.

Do not let the name fool you

Start Testing is a QA and accessibility platform, but do not let the name fool you. It is also a great project management tool. You do not have to run a testing department to get real value from it. Create projects and tasks, assign the work, set priorities and due dates, organize everything into milestones and sprints, track feature ideas, and see what is finished and what is still waiting to be done. If you are trying to keep a team, a client project, or even your own work organized, Start Testing can do that too.

And when testing is part of the work, you do not need to move everything into another platform. You can track bugs, features, milestones, reviews, and releases in the same place as your everyday tasks. You can bring in crash reports and TestFlight feedback from App Store Connect. You can connect GitHub, collect reports through forms, assign the work, review it, and follow it all the way from open to resolved.

The built-in AI can help group duplicate reports, suggest priorities, and summarize what a report is actually about. It is there to help with the repetitive parts. The people doing the testing and making the decisions are still in control. If you are a developer, there is also an API and an MCP server. Start Testing does not have to sit in one browser tab by itself. You can connect it to the tools and workflows you already use.

This is not only for accessibility or QA teams. It is for the solo developer trying to ship an app without losing feedback. It is for the consultant keeping client work organized. It is for the small business or nonprofit that needs one place for projects, tasks, deadlines, and ideas. It is for the agency managing work across clients. It is for the product team that is tired of copying the same work between an inbox, a spreadsheet, a project manager, and a bug tracker. If your work feels scattered right now, I built Start Testing for you too.

Meet Lyra

Oh my gosh, I love Lyra. Lyra is the AI agent inside Start Testing. Not just a chat box that gives you a paragraph and sends you back to do the work yourself. You tell Lyra what you need in plain language, Lyra finds the right projects, people, items, and milestones, and then proposes a plan. Before Lyra changes anything, you approve that plan. Anything destructive requires another clear confirmation. You stay in control, but you do not have to click through ten different screens to get the work done.

Here is the example that made me realize how useful Lyra could be. One day I was testing Start Testing and finding bugs as I went. Instead of stopping every few minutes to write a formal report, I dictated my thoughts. This link is broken. This flow is confusing. This needs to become an issue. Then I kept testing. By the time I finished, I had about an hour of transcript. I pasted the whole thing into Lyra. She created more than a hundred separate issues from it.

And the number was not even the part that surprised me most. Anybody can generate a hundred bad issues. These were good, usable issues. Lyra understood where one problem ended and another one started. She turned my dictated thoughts into work I could actually review, organize, and fix. I was very, very surprised. That saved me from going back through an hour-long transcript, pulling every problem out by hand, and writing more than a hundred reports one at a time. Issues are useful. Good-quality issues are what actually move a project forward.

I have also had Lyra categorize problems so I did not have to open every issue and sort them one at a time. I have had her remove issues I no longer wanted. When I ask her to remove something, she does not quietly delete it and hope for the best. She shows me what she plans to remove and asks me to approve it. I get the speed of an AI agent without giving up control of my project. You can also ask Lyra to set up a milestone, invite somebody to the organization, organize work, or help you understand what is happening across a project. When Lyra finishes, you get a summary of what changed, and those changes are already there in Start Testing.

The name came from Michael. Lyra started as the name of Michael’s agent in Hermes, and we decided to bring that personality into Start Testing. The Star Trek energy is Michael’s. I am not really the Star Trek person in this partnership. But I do love that Lyra has a personality. Software does not have to feel like it was designed by a committee with no personality. Lyra feels like part of the team. That is the point.

Every organization gets 10 free Lyra credits. I want you to be able to give Lyra real work and see what she can do before you pay for an AI add-on. The Start Testing plan and the AI credits are separate on purpose. Your main plan pays for the platform, its project capacity, integrations, and collaboration features. AI credits pay for Lyra and the other AI work. I did not want every customer paying for AI they might never use. AI also has a real operating cost, especially when somebody gives Lyra an hour-long transcript and asks her to create more than a hundred issues. Keeping the credits separate means you can use Start Testing without AI, try Lyra with the 10 credits we give you, and then add more only when the time she saves is worth it to you. AI credits also power things like summaries, duplicate checks, accessibility explanations, and the heavier automation. If you want Start Testing to do more than store the work—if you want it to help move the work forward—this is where the platform really opens up.

Accessibility was never an add-on

I am blind. I use a screen reader every day. I could not build a platform like this and then come back at the end and ask whether a blind tester could use it. I had to be able to use it from the beginning. That changed how we made decisions. Headings have to mean something. Buttons have to say what they do. The workflow has to make sense when you are moving through it with a keyboard and listening to the interface instead of looking at it.

Accessibility is not a badge we added to the website. It is part of the baseline. And yes, that matters for accessibility teams. It should not be normal for somebody to need an inaccessible tool to do accessibility work. But it also makes the platform better for everybody. Clear structure, clear labels, and predictable workflows are just good software.

Start free, then pay for what saves you time

One of the things I kept coming back to was cost. Taking control of your testing should not require a $5,000 contract. You should not need a giant company budget just to stop drowning in spreadsheets. The Individual plan is free. You can use it for one real project and get your bugs, tasks, features, milestones, forms, integrations, and exports organized. The free plan is there so you can prove that Start Testing works for you. It is not a stripped-down demo that disappears after seven days. Put one real project in it. Connect one real source. Use it when actual feedback comes in. Then, if it saves you time, pay for the parts that let it do more.

If you are a solo developer with a few active apps, Individual Pro is $9 a month. That gives you more projects and more integrations, including the workflows that pull work in from GitHub, App Store Connect, and email. Organization plans start at $29 a month when the work no longer belongs to one person. That is where roles, assignments, shared workflows, and team collaboration start to matter. Organization Studio is $79 a month when you need client management, approval flows, accessibility reviews, sprints, and release tracking. There are larger Agency and Enterprise plans when you are managing many client programs or need unlimited project space.

Every organization starts with 10 free Lyra credits. After you use those, AI Starter is $10 a month for 100 monthly credits. AI Plus is $29 a month for 500. AI Scale is $99 a month for 2,500 and the heavier automation and self-healing work. If you would rather pay OpenAI directly, Custom AI Key is $5 a month. You securely connect your organization’s own OpenAI key, and work done through that key does not use Start Testing credits. Do not buy AI credits just because AI is popular. Add them when Lyra can give you back real time. I am not excited because I spent credits. I am excited because I did not have to write more than a hundred issues by hand.

Why pay for any of it? Because losing one important crash report costs you time. Copying issues between three tools costs you time. Manually building the same client report every week costs you time. Hunting through a project to figure out what is stale costs you time. If Start Testing gives some of that time back, the plan is doing its job. You can see the current details on the Start Testing plans and pricing page. Start small. Use it on real work. See whether it gives you back some control and some of your time. That is exactly why the free plan exists.

We could not have done this alone

Look, we could not have done this alone. There are a lot of people I need to thank, and I am probably going to miss a few, so forgive me. The people at Blind Information Technology Solutions put Start Testing through it. Jeff, Michael Babcock, Kayla, Larry, Shane, Doug, and the whole BITS crew: thank you.

You tested it. You broke it. You found the big issues before customers did. You told us when something was confusing, unreliable, or just did not work. Without you, this platform would be a buggy mess of oblivion. I mean that. Start Testing is as reliable as it is today because you were willing to get in there and find the problems. And to everybody who believed in me and signed up for the waiting list, thank you. You supported this before you could even use it. We really appreciate that, and we do not take it lightly. We want to make Start Testing the best platform it can be, and your belief in us helped get it here.

If something goes wrong, tell us

We built a real Start Testing support and feedback page because we want to help you and we want to hear what would make the platform better. Choose Support request when you need help with your account, organization, billing, projects, integrations, Lyra, accessibility, security, privacy, performance, or reliability. Choose Feedback when you have a feature idea, an accessibility or workflow improvement, a Lyra suggestion, an integration request, thoughts about pricing, or something we need to explain better in the documentation.

Every message is recorded in Start Testing and reviewed by the Techopolis team. You receive a reference number, and we normally send a confirmation email so you know we received it. If you are signed in, you can connect the request to your organization. When a problem is hard to reproduce, an organization administrator can also choose to give Techopolis temporary support access. That access is optional, recorded, and ends automatically after 72 hours. Please do not send us passwords, API keys, or other secrets. But if something is broken, confusing, inaccessible, or simply not working the way you need it to, tell us. We cannot promise the platform will never have a bug. We can promise that we want to know about it and make it better.

I want you to feel what I felt

I remember what it felt like to have a platform that held the work together. I also remember the dread of going back to spreadsheets after it was gone. Start Testing is about getting out of that dread. It is about opening one place and knowing what came in, what matters, who owns it, and what needs to happen next. It is about spending more time testing and building, and less time acting like a filing clerk for your own work. And on a personal level, this launch means something else to me too.

There were so many reasons this should have been too much for one developer on a two-person team. There were so many moments when I could have stopped. I did not. If you are building something right now and wondering whether you are capable of finishing it, I understand that feeling. You do not need to have a huge team before you are allowed to solve a real problem. You need to understand the problem, keep showing up, and be willing to rebuild the parts that are not good enough. We did that. Now Start Testing is here.

Try Start Testing now

This is not a waitlist. You do not have to give me your email and hope that someday you get invited. You can create your Start Testing account now.

If you are an individual, start with the free plan and bring in one real project. If you run a company, create your account and set up your organization. If your team is already using Start Testing, ask your manager for an invitation. Do not wait until the spreadsheet gets worse. Do not wait until another crash report disappears, another client asks for an update you have to assemble by hand, or another bug falls through the cracks.

Come try the platform we spent years building. Take control of your testing work. Sign up for Start Testing.