Work doesn't stall.It waits on someone.
Plate is a daily board for small teams. It shows what everyone is on today — and for anything that isn't moving, who it's waiting on and how long it's been sitting there.
Free up to 5 people · Slack in one click · No credit card
One screen. The whole team's day.
Everyone has a plate: what they're on today, what's next, what's stuck. You can see who's carrying the week and who has room, without asking anyone and without a meeting to find out.
| Person | Today | Tomorrow | Later | Blockers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HRHannah Reid | Onboarding empty states 2dSettings copy pass 1d | Board keyboard nav | Mobile grid spike | Approve API contract (2d) — @marcusBilling migration plan (3d) — @ananyaVendor security review (5d) — @priyaSearch indexing spec (1d) — @james |
| MLMarcus Lee | Review queue triage 3d | API contract sign-off | Billing migration plan | — |
| PSPriya Shah | Digest email tests 1d | Threshold settings | — | Ship pricing page copy (6d) — @marcus |
| ARAnanya Rao | Mobile nav fix 1dEmpty state copy 2d | Icon set pass | — | Design review — settings (4d) — @marcus |
| JCJames Cole | Nothing today | Search indexing | History retention job | Sign off launch email (1d) — @marcus |
Five people. Seven things waiting on someone else — four of them on Marcus. One person actually has today free.
Capacity isn't how much is on your plate. It's how much of it you can move.
Someone holding six tasks with four of them blocked has room today. Someone holding three that are all live doesn't. Every other tool counts six. Plate counts two.
That's why blocked has to name a person. Without it, the number on the board is fiction.
Everyone can see their own delay.
Nobody can see the pattern.
Blocked is stored as a status, or a link to another ticket. So the one number that matters — how many people are stuck behind the same person — doesn't exist anywhere.
Asked once, on a Tuesday
It went in a thread and scrolled away. Neither person remembers, and nothing re-raises it.
All behind one person
Each of them thinks it's a one-off. It's the fourth this week, and no tool adds them up.
Nobody escalates
Chasing a teammate feels like nagging, so people wait. Quietly, and far longer than they should.
Blocked is a relationship,
not a status.
In Plate you can't mark something blocked without naming the person you're waiting on. That one required field is what makes everything else possible.
One required field. Everything follows.
Name who you're waiting on
Not a status, not a ticket link. A person. One click, and it's the only thing Plate insists on.
Plate starts the clock
Working days only. Weekends and time off never count against anyone. The number is a fact, not an opinion.
Both sides get told
The person holding it hears they're holding it. The lead hears when a wait crosses the threshold they set.
Waiting isn't the same as sitting on it.
Plate keeps them separate on purpose, because conflating them is how a work tool turns into a stick.
Days you've held it
Counts while the task is yours and moving. Pauses the moment you're blocked.You're never penalised for waiting on someone else.
Days it's been waiting
Starts exactly when the other one stops. This is the number no other tool keeps, and it's where work actually dies.
Nobody has to open anything.
The board holds the truth. Slack does the telling. If your week is quiet you hear nothing — and that silence is information too.
Longest: Priya, 6 days, "Ship pricing page copy".
Priya → Marcus, now 6 days. Third time this month.
You don't have to move anything.
Plate isn't where issues live. Keep Linear, Jira, Notion, or whatever you're already on. Plate answers the question none of them answer: is this moving, and who is it sitting with.
Which means the thing Plate actually replaces isn't a tool. It's the daily standup that exists so someone can ask "any update on that?", and the round of DMs when the standup doesn't produce one.
Keep your tracker.
No migration, no import, no arguing about which tool wins.
Drop the check-in call.
The board answers what the meeting was for.
Stop chasing.
Plate does the asking, so nobody has to feel like they're nagging.
What Plate refuses to be.
Small-team tools die by accumulating features built for bigger teams. These aren't on the roadmap. They're on the do-not-build list.
Connect Slack. Add your team. That's the setup.
Nothing to import, nothing to configure. The board is empty until someone puts something on it, which takes about as long as typing it.
Install once
One Slack app for the whole workspace. One person installs it; nobody else authorises anything.
Add your team by email
Plate matches each address to a Slack account, so DMs land in the right place from the first morning.
Everyone fills their plate
Three columns, a line each. First morning takes a few minutes; after that it's yesterday's leftovers plus whatever's new.
The first digest arrives tomorrow
If nobody's waiting on anybody, you hear nothing. That's the intended state, not a setup failure.
Flat rate. Not per seat.
Per-seat pricing charges you extra for adding the person everyone is waiting on. That seemed like the wrong incentive.
Free
Up to 5 people. Everything included.
- Board, blockers and the waiting graph
- Slack digest and DMs
- 90 days of history
Team
Up to 15 people. One price, however many you add.
- Everything in Free
- Unlimited history and search
- Wait thresholds you set
- Weekly summary to Slack
The ones worth asking.
Isn't this just a way to blame the slow person?
It's the objection we take most seriously, so here's the honest answer: the person everyone is waiting on is usually the mostoverloaded person on the team, not the least committed. They're the reviewer, the approver, the only one who knows that system.
Right now nobody sees that, including them. Four people each think they're making one small request. Surfacing the queue argues forthat person: it's evidence they need help, or that the team routes too much through one human. Plate measures the queue, never the human. No productivity score, no activity feed, no idle indicator, and there never will be.
What if people just don't mark things blocked?
Then you learn something real. But blocking takes one click and immediately puts pressure somewhere useful — on the person who can clear it. People mark blocks readily once it produces a nudge instead of a shrug.
Do we have to change how we plan?
Only if you run formal sprints. Plate assumes a one-to-three day horizon, which is how most teams under fifteen already work regardless of what their tool assumes.
Is this a replacement for standup?
For most teams, yes. The board covers what everyone is on, and Slack covers anything that needs raising. Teams that keep the meeting usually shorten it, because nobody has to spend it reading out status.
What if we don't use Slack?
The board works on its own and email digests are available, but you'll get less out of it. Being told, rather than having to look, is most of the value.
Find out who's waiting on you.
Set it up in a few minutes. If nothing on your team is waiting, you'll know that too — and you can stop wondering.