Trello Business Class too expensive

[Deleted user]

So I have a free license and a board that a team of 10 people work with and 20 others should only read.  Costs me nothing. In order to use the Observer restriction on the 20 I need a business class license. $10.00 a month per user times 30 users equals $3600 a year, just for observer licenses. Who would be foolish enough to pay that when they can make do and pay nothing.

Now if you required business class but didn’t count Observers in the user count, it would only cost me $1200 per year. Better but still too expensive. We’re talking one or two boards. Can’t justify value against cost.

May I suggest a Professional class, permits Observers but doesn’t count them. $4 or $5 a month. For my use case that’s around $500 per year. Then I might buy it. 

[Daniel Hogan]

Hey Bob,

Haha, I guess your observation fell on deaf ears because 4 months later and nothing has changed.

We only three or four active people on my team for any given project, but would cost us $80 a month for my team alone.

If my boss wanted to standardize Trello as the tool set for all of his teams under him, he would be paying $50/mo just for his license costs alone, just to view.

$10/user/team is a ridiculous price model for any scaling. This can easily become more expensive than the entire office365 suite license that includes sharepoint(more feature rich but cumbersome version of) confluence and planner(trello type boards). Yet o365 also includes the entire office suite and other applications!

This pricing is a joke for a simple kanban board that happens to have some additional features. I really wish Attlasian would get there crap together on this, because while I like Trello a lot, the pricing to actually pay for it is quite insane.  Despite the benefits, there is no overview level built in, and it's a hard sell to management to approve the astronomical expense above the free version. Butler power up seems nice, but it doesn't cost my supervisor any of his time for me to manually gather details from multiple projects/boards to give him a status updates. Without built in card sync capabilities that still requires time overhead for setting up rules to match our needs. This pricing is even out of whack with other Attlasian products.The minor benefits over planner mixed with the additional cost of confluence when we already have sharepoint and planner, just won't float.

Keep milking the cow like this and watch it die!

[Shiva Bandari]

I agree with you Daniel. I have been using Trello for long time. I loved it. Now with the 10/user/month model, my team is planning to limit the usage of Trello. We can not afford this unreasonable pricing model.

[AndrewW]

We've been forced to dump Trello, due to the short-sighted greed and lack of focus of its developer, Atlassian. We last used Trello on a large EU-based research and development project that ended some 15 months ago. This involved some 35–45 users from 14 different organisations. It is notable that since that project ended, every organisation involved has now dropped Trello — and all for the same reason. It is fundamentally unfit for practical business use on anything but the most simplistic and small-scale of projects. The developer is stubbornly making zero effort to provide users with the functionality they need. Development appears entirely internally driven, and focussed on adding unnecessary bells and whistles. Meanwhile the price is now so stratospheric that it simply feels like extortion.

The "greed is good" business model embraced by Trello (and, sadly, also by many other SAAS developers) is truly depressing. Trello was good while it lasted, but it's pretty much over for professional project managers. Atlassian has neither the vision, leadership nor user-focus for Trello to ever achieve the promise that it once offered.

[Richard Kramer]

Hi,

I agree with you guys! I'd like to use it with more than 1 PowerUp but it would cost me $10, a month. Too expensive for my taste regarding that PowerUps cost money too!

KInd regards,

Richard

[Daniel Hogan]

It's even worse than that though. If you are a member on 5 business teams, the cost for you alone would be $50/mo.

[Tim Savage]

Same as Richard, went to buy a subscription to add some more power ups but was expecting 5 or 6 euros, not over €11 a month (only pay monthly, not annually)! That's not much less than I pay for my Adobe CC which is half a dozen very complex apps.

Shame as I was happy to pay and sign up immediately.

[Deleted user]

Hey Bob,

You make a very good point. If you would like to suggest ideas/features that are not already in Trello, here is a support email link. feature-ideas@trello.com

Best regards.

Bennett-Jr M.
Chief Executive Officer & Customer Support Advocate

[Pavlo Levandovskyi]

I`m working in a low margin business, although it`s a biofuel business. Good thing it`s Environment-friendly one). So We have production at Belarus and Ukraine, And sales office in Belarus and Latvia. We deliver our goods to a western European country. And you know, It`s a hard organized business. With 2 reloadings in a middle. Switching railway to tracks, and then to smaller trucks with delivering to the last customer. In this business, we have a margin from 5 to 10 %. And crossing borders it`s a nightmare with this customs clearance, all the paperwork, and different legislation. So selling 4000 tons per month, 48 000 tons per year which is 2176 tracks, it`s 9 full big trucks every working day in the year. We have 2,5 million cash flow and only 144 000 of net profit. We love to use your "business account" to have automatizations and addons for 10 people team. But we can`t afford 1200 Euros per year for it. It`s good when you have margin of about 10-15% Or at least a business with a big scale and margin of 5-10% but in borders of one country, or a trading zone like E.U. which reduces cost and makes more easy paperwork. But, in my case and a similar scenario you should have some more reasonable price, course we need in good management, automatization of sales, and project management.