Plan-It

The Capital Improvement Planning platform behind city budgets
across North America — since 1999.

AI-AUGMENTED PRODUCT ENGINEERING

How a 25-year-old SaaS platform got 50% more tickets done per sprint — and a real AI story.

Plan-It is the longest-running Capital Improvement Planning platform in North America, serving city finance and public works leaders since 1999. After years on a legacy stack with a previous offshore team that wasn’t keeping up, the product needed speed, a clean reporting layer, and a credible AI roadmap. Ekreative embedded as Plan-It’s product engineering partner — working in their stack, repos, and sprint cadence — to deliver all three.

~ 50 %
MORE TICKETS PER SPRINT
2–3 x
FASTER DELIVERY
25 + years
PLATFORM NOW AI-READY
THE PROBLEM

Aging platform,
no AI story.

Core areas of the legacy app were slow. Hundreds of customerfacing reports had been built in inconsistent styles over the years — painful to maintain and full of duplicate templates.

Release notes for non-technical municipal users weren’t keeping up. And buyers were starting to ask how Plan-It would use AI — the roadmap had no answer.

THE APPROACH

Embedded product engineering partner.

Ekreative replaced the previous overseas team and embedded directly in Plan-It’s stack and sprint cadence. We optimized slow core areas with zero customer-facing downtime, and used AIassisted code transformation to consolidate hundreds of reports into one design system.

Then layered in net-new product surfaces — a Next.js + Vercel + Cloudflare budget transparency service for cities, plus a custom tool that auto-generates customer-readable release notes from git commits, published weekly.

RESULTS & ROI

What changed for PlanIt!

  • ~50% more tickets per sprint —
    from ~10 to ~15 closed every two weeks.
  • 2–3× faster on typical work,
    up to 10× on AI-suitable tasks.
  • Reports unified
    into a single, maintainable design system.
  • Weekly AI-generated release notes
    shipped to customers automatically.
  • Net-new product surface —
    public budget transparency service live.
  • Trusted partner —
    in-house experiment ended; work came back to Ekreative.
— Shaylan Hurley · Head of Plan-It Software · Minneapolis, MN
"Ekreative helped our company grow faster than I imagined. Their critical thinking, problem-solving, and proactive recommendations set them apart — especially for an offshore team."