Trello's Plans with Butler

Question

I would like to know, if is necessary sign the Business Class and Silver Platter Service to use the Butler.

The Silver Platter can do 250 comands per week and 2500 operations per week, and the Royal Treatment can do 100 comands and 5000 operations per week.

Now I don'd know how many comands i will need. If i start to the Silver and After  changed to the Royal i will lost the comands that i alredy done?

Katrin Anger · Answer

@Murillo de Aguiar Belo

The answer is pretty much straight forward.

You need neither the Trello Business Class nor Butler's Silver Platter to get started with Butler. Butler had a generous free pricing plan.

Upgrading to a new tier - when you run out of weekly operations - will not make you loose any commands previously created.

--- This was the scenario before Butler was acquired by Trello ---

Now, we are waiting to hear about the conditions of use for Butler after it has been integrated into Trello. From what I know, there will be a free plan for all users, but certain features and higher operation limits will be for paying clients only.

Iain Dooley · Answer

@Murillo de Aguiar Belo To answer these questions in sequence:

1) You don't need Trello Business Class to use Butler, except for the fact that if you're using Butler's power up (rather than Butler Bot) you will only be able to have one power up per board unless that board is part of a Business Class team. Butler Bot can be included on as many boards as you like without affecting your power up limit. They used to have a section on their home page that said "Looking for Butler Bot?" which they have removed -- this makes me think they are phasing out Butler Bot and focusing on the Power Up.

2) When you upgrade from one plan to another, the quota is added pro rata for the rest of the period you're in, so you don't have to worry about switching plans

HOWEVER, just be aware that (at least when I was using it) there is no way to buy additional commands. You need to check with them to make sure this is still the case.

When I was consulting with Butler, what I ended up having to do after creating a system that was sufficiently complicated that it was exhausting the command limit weekly for the Butler Bot team plan I was on, was to create dummy Trello accounts with Gmail aliases and add them to the team to get 1,250 more commands.

Also check with them whether they have the ability to replay commands yet. When I was using it, if your commands ran out that's *IT*, your whole operation falls of a cliff. They don't get replayed. At the time I was using it there was no monitoring, that may have changed, but it meant it could really take you by surprise.

So check with them on those details and make sure it's the right fit for your use case.

Ultimately I had to stop using Butler because they told me that I was violating their T&C by providing consulting services with it (there was a catalysing event for that which I should probably write up in detail in a blog post at some point .... ), and that it was for "personal use only". So just beware thatif you're planning on using this to create critical business systems and think you might use more than 5,000 commands per week, then it may not be the right tool for the job.

After they kicked me off their platform I created this open source framework for automating Trello with Google Apps Script using a "Butler Like" syntax and moved my clients over to it:

http://trello.com/integrations/#trellinator