Confusing billing and way over priced

[Rolande Hall]

I honestly don’t get how the pricing structure was ever signed off.
Trello is great, but the pricing structure is confusing and the jump from free to premium, cost-wise is too huge to swallow. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to pay at all, we realise getting what we want so far for free is great and we would pay for more functionality but it’s just insane how much it would cost for our team to use it, we’re only a small team!

We use it for free for everything we need it for (a few users at work, 2 boards, lots of cards) I’d love to access the timeline view, but to do this I’d have to pay nearly $800 dollars per year for the premium account. That’s a hard pill to swallow when we can do everything apart from that, for free. Then when I add more users or a guest to more than one card, I’ll get charged again for them.

Why not just have a premium package that has “up to x amount of guests on x amount of boards and x cards” or something similar. It’s all so confusing and convoluted for something that could be streamlined into a simple package so easily. 

Make premium $300 per year or similar with unlimited guests, unlimited cards and 10 boards and they’d have so many more people paying for it.

Seems insane to me. Who does the market research?
Am I missing something here?

We’ve got used to trello, but we are now having meetings about moving the whole thing to a different cheaper provider.

Is the pricing structure staying? Are other people as confused and annoyed as I am? 

let me know!

[Alex W]

Hi @Rolande Hall - happy to clarify why Trello's billing structure is the way it is...

Like all other Atlassian products, Trello is focused on teams, and is billed by headcount in a team, or rather, a workspace in Trello's case. As a result, we bill for the following users in a Standard or Premium workspace:

• Members of the Standard or Premium workspace
• Multi-board guests - users that have been added to two or more boards in the Standard or Premium workspace

Single-board guests - users that have been added to only one board in the Standard or Premium workspace - are not billable. 

Our Enterprise subscription only bills for licensed members, and you won't get charged for guests on Enterprise. However, our Standard and Premium subscriptions will continue to charge for multi-board guests, as those guests are accessing Standard/Premium features, so therefore you have to pay for that access.

Some things to clarify here:

• If you wish to reduce your billing cost if you're considering upgrading to Premium, then you would make a reduction in the amount of workspace members / multi-board guests you have in the workspace you're trying to upgrade. 
• If you only have one or two boards you want to have access Premium features like the Timeline View, you could create a new workspace with just these board(s), only add the people you want to pay for to this workspace, then start a subscription on this workspace

I understand you may be frustrated by the costs, but these costs are ultimately a reflection of how many people are in your workspace that are considered billable. If you reduce your billable users, your bill will go down. 

[Rolande Hall]

Thank you for replying. I really appreciate the time you’ve taken to respond.

The second option you’ve suggested may work for me and the team. I’ll probably do exactly what you have suggested.

I understand the billing structure now after reading more about it and also your explanation, thank you.

I still think it’s still initially quite confusing and frustrating. The fact it’s taken me a while to get my head around the billing structure and user restrictions should tell you all you need to know. I can’t be the only one who feels this. 

Just a shame there isn’t just a ‘one size fits all’ solution. Like 20 users 10 boards 5 workspaces or similar for $500 per year.  Pretty sure sales would skyrocket if there was. People want simplicity, when they see and understand something immediately they’re more likely to pay for it. Confusion really turns customers off as I’m sure you know! 

Again I appreciate the time you’ve taken to explain everything, thanks so much.

Have a great day.

[Marianne Djudic]

Do I understand correctly that if I have a Premium subscription I can invite a guest to one board in my workspace without additional costs? But if I invite them to two boards or more I have to pay a fee?