Is there a way to work without teams?

[Loes]

Today I learned that Teams cannot open more than 10 boards. My company has many teams and many more boards and no funds to pay for a Business Class account for all my users at the moment. So can I drop teams and still use boards and share them? How does that work? Can I use trello without 'teams'? What do I need to do? How to I delete teams? I learned that it is in effect immediately so we're very screwed. Please advice! Thanks a lot. 

[Iain Dooley]

@Loes Boards don't need to belong to teams at all if you don't want them to. A few things to note:

1) You will always have access to any boards that predate 19 of March and up to 10 more until 1 May at no cost on free teams

2) If you upgrade to business class, you can split your boards into Collections, which is what many people use teams for. So if you had, say, 6 people that you wanted to have as members of a Business Class team, you could still have unlimited boards in unlimited collections

3) For a business class team, you can have unlimited single board guests. So if you have a core of only a few people then lots of boards where you invite external people to each one (clients, contractors etc.) then you would still only pay for the few people you have in your business class team as members

4) The features that you get from having a team are not actually vital to using Trello, they're just kind of convenient in some cases. For example, if you use a team you can have a board that is team viewable that team members can comment on but cannot self join. If you have a team then you can make a board team visible and have a "self-join" option for team members. But outside of that, if you just want to have a Trello board with a bunch of people on it and you don't need to have any sort of permission controls, you can just create them as personal boards and add people to them. If you're worried about having too many personal boards just star the important ones then create a "board of boards" where any boards you create are linked to cards so you can have a "better boards view" and approximate what collections/teams do in the interface anyway

So the bottom line is that, for people who don't have the money to pay for Trello business class, you can still keep using Trello for free, but slightly differently.

[Katrin Anger]

@Loes 

That's probably a question many people will run into now.

Generally speaking, Trello is organized by teams. Other applications use subfolders or labels. Trello uses teams in its linguistics.

You can have boards not assigned to any team. These would show up in your "Personal Boards" section. But I am not totally sure how they are accessible by other users.

Now, that Trello is imposing the limit of max. 10 boards to teams, I think the way to go is to set up some sophisticated systems of Trello teams.

Fortunately, you can have as many teams as you want: 10 or 100 or 1000. 

In regards to "being screwed": there is a "period of grace" - until May 1 - in which existing teams can have added up to 10 additional boards. When you set them up as placeholder boards now, you will have some room to breathe for the time ahead. For the mid-term, I think you have to develop a good strategy for setting up a good system of teams.