Free guests vs board guest vs multi-board guests I am confused - HELP

Question

I am sure this has been asked but after searching I am even more confused:

Here is the deal: I use Trello free account works great, I have bout 3 boards etc. I have been invited and use about 4 more boards from other people.  We are thinking of upgrading to premium to get the gant charts etc, but I don't get the reason why users are now going to be multi-user accounts and have to pay?

Want I want to be true (does not mean it is) is have 5 of our users (the people who want the features) get the accounts, but then I wan the rest of the users who have been using free for years to stay on free but be able to see the boards the premium users are making.

I also do not get why I (free account) can be on multiple boards but not have to me a multi-board account? is it because the boards I am on are free too?

this is almost as bad as MS licensing?

Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows · Answer

@Jason Holder If your coworker is a workspace member or a multi-board guest, when you upgrade your workspace to Premium, he'll be counted as a license within your workspace and you'll be charged for that user.

So if you have 5 users in your workspace who are workspace members or multi-board guests, and you have 10 people who are free single-board guests, when you upgrade your workspace to Premium, your total subscription cost will be $50 p/mo (on the annual plan).  All 15 users will be able to utilize the Premium features on the boards they have access to seeing as these features are applied at the workspace level.

Jason Holder_t7ezsv · Answer

Thank you for that information is is helpful. I have a follow up:

Because I use a free workspace with 4 boards in it, I have invited a coworker who also uses free trello and works on all 4 boards.

When I upgrade to Premium (Workspace) will my coworker need to upgrade also to see my boards?

Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows · Answer

@Jason Holder welcome to the community!

Trello's pricing works at the workspace level; not the user level. When you upgrade to a paid subscription, it gets associated to your workspace. All boards within that workspace will benefit from the paid features.

Adding workspace members allows these users to view and utilize these boards that have the paid features. Generally, you would create one workspace for your company and add all internal staff to your workspace as workspace members.

You might also work with other people who aren't internal staff, so external stakeholders like partners or freelancers. They may only interact with Trello occasionally, so it doesn't make sense to add them as a workspace member and pay for them. Trello allows you to add guests to your workspace for this purpose.

To add a guest to your workspace, rather than adding them as a workspace member, simply add them directly to a board within your workspace.

- Free: they are a member of one board.
- Paid: they are a member of more than one board (they basically get all the benefits of a workspace member so are charged the same amount).

Hope that clarifies things!