Announcement of 10 team boards max

[bob boom]

I clearly remember the official declaration that Trello would be free forever. Though I do accept that charges could be asked for new features, extensions, etc., but Trello as it was during that official statement should remain free as officially guaranteed - including teams.

Now you are breaking Trello's solemn promise by demanding fees for features that were already there when the promise was made.

I have considered upgrading in order to have more power-ups, but since I would have to pay for the power-ups and pay for the privilege to be allowed to have more power-ups, I feel I would be paying twice for the power-ups, paying double. It is like paying an entrance fee to an amusement park and still have to pay for each ride. Therefore I have not upgraded.

I have over the course of years integrated Trello in my life and businesses, setting up extensive GTD-systems for myself and several "teams" in order to organize my businesses.  Not only have I introduced Trello to hundreds of new users (making Trello boards for all new students of two educational institutions) - but you could say I have fully committed and surrendered to Trello. Now I would have to dismantle my entire organisation in order to reduce the number of boards per team.


Since Atlassian has purchased Trello it seems that the original Trello-spirit has been lost.

P.S. Please don't misunderstand me, I do appreciate Trello, as a matter of fact I love Trello! I am not entitled, ungrateful, unreasonable and such. 

[Iain Dooley]

@bob boom well .... if you just delete the teams, then your boards will remain and you won't have to pay anything... OR you can leave your existing teams exactly as they are and retain access to those boards (+10 more) forever and just create new teams as required that only have 10 boards in them (mixed with personal boards) ... OR you can pay for Business class for yourself and then add all your boards to collections which does the same thing (basically) that teams used to do.

It really depends on what you need and how you need to use it, but there's nothing about teams that really add that much functionality to Trello or that make it prohibitively expensive, especially if you're using it for everything.

That being said, I don't pay for Trello because I don't use any power ups and don't need teams. What I *WOULD* pay for (if anyone at Trello is listening ;) is the enterprise plan so I could have domain control and single sign on, but that's only available to organisations over 25 or so users.

My opinion is that Trello's pricing should not have this weird dichotomy between business class (which goes by team) and enterprise (which is for a whole domain) -- they should just have the current enterprise model be the model used for any paid plan and differentiate based on number of power ups, automation with Butler and so on.

But anyway, I don't think they're renegging on their "free forever" promise by charging for teams to have more than 10 boards. I also don't think it's a particularly effective pricing strategy and this change still has no reason for me to upgrade to a paid plan!

[sportsscientist]

I think a more savvy approach would be to reward long-time users a multi-year discount or other discounted structure that helps retain them as users.  It really just seems like Atlassian bought Trello, and now the corporate machine is simply going thru Atlassian properties and saying, "Oh wait, this is free?  Let's introduce some kind of pricing to generate at least some income."  

The free model wasn't entirely thought out by the architects of many different sites/platforms.  It was easy to offer it in the beginning because 1) they probably had "enough" start up money and 2) there really isn't a better way to build a following and grow your user base.

That said, when my free platforms move to a paid model, first I have to decide if it is really worth it to start paying.  In your case it sounds like you've gone all in on Trello so your answer is probably YES.

So if I have to start paying, I just try to think about the total term of the service.  I might have used it for free for many eight years, but now have to pay $100/year.  I conceptualize it by considering my costs to be spread out over that time, even if I am now paying $100/year.  Kind of like buy now but first payment is due later with no interest (increases).

At least for now it seems like Trello has enough inherent flexibility so that one can work around pretty much any programming limitation or in this case a pricing/product change, as noted in Iain's post.

Fun times ahead. . .