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Free or paid account?

Jo Butler

I have a business account and if I want to add another user or member to my team I have to pay for them

As far as I can see, if I had a free account, I could add them and pay nothing??

Am I seeing this correctly?

What are teh disadvantages of going back to free. I'm just a one person business but am going to hire and admin to help with tasks. I want her to have access to my Trello boards as that's where we'll house all the tasks and systems she needs to run

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rax adaam

As far as I have been able to figure out, yes, you would have to pay for them to access your boards. A quick search of "why you shouldn't pay for Trello" turns up some interesting perspectives on Trello's pricing system. There seem to be quite a few user cases that make paying for Trello a serious disadvantage & I have heard of many teams downgrading to free accounts because of exactly this situation (i.e. having to pay outrageous fees for a team when only a small percentage of the team is actively using Trello, but the others need to be able to at least view the boards).

In personal use, I was ready to upgrade so I could have access to more butler automations; however, to share the list with my wife, we'd both have to pay, and it's not worth it. Unfortunately, Trello doesn't seem to have figured out how to monetize their free users, effectively yet...

What I'm personally trying to figure out is whether the free trello account will be sufficient: I don't want to spend any more time setting up boards and rules only to find that it'll only continue to be useful if I upgrade. For a small business (e.g. 5-10 employees), $600-$1200USD / year for an organizational app is *way* too expensive, IMO.

Jo Butler

Thank you. These are my thoughts exactly. I think I can work around most of the upgrades I have as a paying member. I only have one other team member currently and I just share my login with her so I dont have to pay for her. I'm a really small business and she just does a few admin jobs for me. Prior to paying she was on the board without payment. Maybe I'll downgrade

Iain Dooley

@Jo Butler @rax adaam the big loophole in paying for Trello even since they added their 10 board limit has been the fact that personal boards had unlimited members.

Now they are closing that loophole, more people will need to pay.

However, if you're a paying member currently, and you want to have an admin person come on and do some stuff but not be a full team member you can:

1) Downgrade to free, lose the paid features (like increased butler quota and unlimited power ups and boards), ensure you only have 10 boards per team and add your admin member to your team

2) Keep your paid plan on your team, but invite your new admin person to only one board, then they won't be billable and you'll still have the increased Butler quota for automations HOWEVER that person won't have access to the advanced checklists feature even though they will have access to unlimited power ups within that board (weird!)

The handy thing from the perspective of having a "work Trello" that you pay for and a "home Trello" that you share with your spouse now is that they have introduced account switchers on both the mobile and desktop apps, so you can easily have your personal Trello with a free team, up to 10 boards, shared with your family and friends, with no problems, then have your business class team in another account.

My guess is that the next restriction to be introduced will be the number of teams per "account". Currently the notion of "account" and "team" are completely separate, however I'm guessing that the final loophole to be closed is that you can currently create unlimited free teams in order to get around the 10 board per free team limit, although that's just conjecture on my behalf.

rax adaam

LOL - I am currently invested with Atlassian, but if there approach to monetizing their product is to "close loopholes" as opposed to creating value and working out a coherent payment plan, I'll be selling my shares ASAP.

Not only that, but if this is really their strategy, I think I'll be moving my team off of Trello: this is absurdly overly complicated and very user-unfriendly: if you pay for an app, it's paid for - you should have access to all the features, regardless of whether you're using it for work or your personal life.

I'm genuinely dumbfounded and disappointed by this: Trello seems like a good tool. I'm willing to pay some amount for it, but if they can't figure out a way to be profitable that doesn't involve over-charging and creating unnecessarily complicated rules between personal boards and professional boards (not to mention making collaboration more difficult), then I really can't see how the product will survive...

Wow - I really don't get the logic here: this billing method means that you would have to pay for every team you belong to, right? That immediately kills word-of-mouth advertising for them, as the barrier to sharing the product with anyone else is being willing to pay an additional $120USD / year for a product you're already paying for (or compromise your organization so that the individual can view everything -- except advanced checklists, lol -- on one board).

Think I'll see where ZenKit is at these days before investing more time setting up Trello for my team... Thanks for sharing this info, I think you saved us a lot of time, money & headaches. Too bad Atlassian doesn't make it easier for users to reach out: it's a product with great potential, but the business side has been completely blundered.

Iain Dooley

@rax adaam yes with the billing currently, if your same Trello user is a member of multiple business class teams, then each membership will be charged. If the same Trello user is a member of multiple boards in multiple business class teams, likewise the same Trello user would be billable in more than one team and so on.

Just to be clear though I don't think they'll ever get rid of free teams, but from what I can see coming down the line in terms of the changes to personal boards (ie. you have to add each board to a team now when you invite another member to it) it seems like the next progression is going to be to restrict the number of free teams you can have in your account, because otherwise people would just be able to get around that restriction by simply creating a free team for every single board and it would be pointless to have implemented it in the first place.

Trello billing has always been a bit weird because it was attached to "teams" but the actual real life use cases for having "teams" were pretty limited. I think what they're doing now is making things more "account like" as we're used to in other products so it seems like a step in the right direction to me. I love Trello so I am keen to see them figure it out and generate the revenue they deserve!

Jo Butler

I'm so confused now. I'm more than happy to pay for hte account I have, but don't see why I can't include others when I can in the free account. I probably don't really need the upgraded benefits of the paid account, I can easily work around not having them.

So I guess there's no advantage to me having a paid account??

Jo Butler

Thank you everyone. I've moved to Asana.

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