Utterly confused about billing - can someone please help?

[Gothic Admin]

I guess first off I should ask, is there a contact number for Trello? I have searched and can't find one anywhere.

I've been looking at the new billing documentation on the site a lot over the past few weeks and I still can't be sure of what we need. Here's the situation: We're a small company that use trello to work with outside artists on projects.

We have a workspace, with less than 10 boards and the core team which are Admin or Members on all workspaces are less than 10 people. Anyone we work with is invited to a board as a guest and removed when that project is completed. We rarely have multi board guests and if we need to will avoid having any multi board guests. I think this means we don't need a paid subscription but a colleague is convinced we can't have any single board guests at all with a free plan. Is that correct?

If we have just two multi board guests, does that mean we need to pay for all 10 members and 2 guests? So the difference between having 10 members/multi board guests (free account) and 12 members/multi board guests is paying for all 12 rather than just the 2 above the 10 member limit? That seems odd... We are a small company and Trello has been helpful so we're not adverse to paying for the service but we don't even know what we need and how much it's going to cost us.

If Trello just said, pay $20 or $30 a month for a premium plan and you can have 10 members and say 50 guests on each board, we'd have paid up straight away no issue. Right now though, it seems so vague - if we add a guest halfway through a month and then remove them two weeks later is the rate pro-rata or does that guest need a full years subscription paid for by us? Frankly we do not understand what this is going to cost us and if costs are going to spiral without us realising. Do we need a standard plan or premium? We think standard but at this point we can't be sure. Is there a limit on workspaces we can create (we have a couple of other workspaces with not much on them and should remain free whatever but who knows...)

I do not understand why this has to be so confusing but I know that I need help and preferably to speak to someone at Trello. Can anyone please advise? Thanks

[Dreamsuite Mike]

Hi @Gothic Admin 

Welcome to the community, I will answer your questions in turn to the best of my ability...

We have a workspace, with less than 10 boards and the core team which are Admin or Members on all workspaces are less than 10 people. Anyone we work with is invited to a board as a guest and removed when that project is completed. We rarely have multi board guests and if we need to will avoid having any multi board guests. I think this means we don't need a paid subscription but a colleague is convinced we can't have any single board guests at all with a free plan. Is that correct?

Single board guest is basically a free guest within a paid workspace, since Trello free version is well, free..Single-board guests don't exist.
So anyone in your workspace, regardless of if they are on 1 or 10 boards will counts as a collaborator

If we have just two multi board guests, does that mean we need to pay for all 10 members and 2 guests? So the difference between having 10 members/multi board guests (free account) and 12 members/multi board guests is paying for all 12 rather than just the 2 above the 10 member limit? That seems odd... We are a small company and Trello has been helpful so we're not adverse to paying for the service but we don't even know what we need and how much it's going to cost us.

You aren't paying to exceed the free limit, you are paying to upgrade to a paid version, which not only removes the limits imposed in the Free version (10 boards and 10 Collaborators) but also give you many more features... 

If you have 8 workspace members and 2 multi-board guests, you would have to pay for 10 licences in total, so for Trello standard this would be $60/month or $600/year

If Trello just said, pay $20 or $30 a month for a premium plan and you can have 10 members and say 50 guests on each board, we'd have paid up straight away no issue. Right now though, it seems so vague - if we add a guest halfway through a month and then remove them two weeks later is the rate pro-rata or does that guest need a full years subscription paid for by us? Frankly we do not understand what this is going to cost us and if costs are going to spiral without us realising. Do we need a standard plan or premium? We think standard but at this point we can't be sure. Is there a limit on workspaces we can create (we have a couple of other workspaces with not much on them and should remain free whatever but who knows...)

Simply put, Trello says "pay $12.50/month for each member who accesses more than 1 board in your premium workspace" or "pay $6/month for each member who accesses more than 1 board in your standard workspace"

If you have been happy with Trello free, I very much doubt you need Trello Premium.  

In this case where you add and remove mulit-board guests from your workspace, it would be wise to pay monthly, you can then adapt to the changes in your user count. When someone is removed, you don't get a refund, you get an available seat to give to someone else for the remainder of that billing period.  If you pay monthly and remove them half way through the month, your next bill will go down by the cost of 1 user

By the sounds of it, you have a stable team of like 8 people with people who come and go to collaborate on a project level. So long as you have a 1 board per project approach, the invited people would only ever need to be single-board guests.  Which means for 8 people you'd pay $480/year.

If your external people only need to view and comment on things, I would also recommend looking at External Share Powerup 

I do not understand why this has to be so confusing but I know that I need help and preferably to speak to someone at Trello. Can anyone please advise? Thanks

Honest opinion from someone who spends lots of time with lots of different software...Its only confusing because its new and a change from what was there before.  Compared to other similar software pricing models, it is no more confusing and many other cases, far more confusing *cough* monday.com *cough

Also, speaking to someone at Trello is not going to change what they are doing, furthermore they will just tell you the same things that are in this community, so I think you'll be setting yourself up for disappointment (btw, there isn't a phone number)

[Gothic Admin]

That is all very helpful information. Looking again we have 9 members and 1 multi-board user so on the standard plan we're looking at $600/year plus whatever multi-board members we accrue along the way.

Our premium free trial was meant to end on Sunday but it's still showing as Premium and I see nothing in the billing section to change that to standard and input our card details (which are not there yet). Am I looking in the wrong place?

I can't lie, from free to $600/year is not ideal and pretty disheartening but we don't have a choice with our workflow so we've made the decision to do that, at least for the time being.

Thank you again for providing clear information. Honestly, with all the nuances around members, admins, guests, collaborators etc etc it gets very confusing and it has not been simple at all trying to navigate that. Maybe I'm just stupid but it really does feel like this could have been made clearer.