Will Trello stop being free for private use when having over 10 Boards?

[Janusz Siodmiak]

Hi. I use Trello privately. I got an email that I 've got Business Class, with limitation of up to 10 Boards for free users and free trial ending 30th June. Is this an offer I cannot refuse and Trello moves towards paid platform for over 10 Boards, or Trello will work for me as it has after 30th June? Thanks,

[Iain Dooley]

@Janusz Siodmiak So what's happened is that you've gone through the process of moving all your boards (I assume more than 10) into a single workspace, which has commenced a business class trial because the maximum boards per free workspace is 10.

However, you can just redistribute your boards to other workspaces, you can currently still have as many free workspaces as you like.

At first during this transition there was still the notion of a "personal" board that couldn't have more than just yourself as a member, but that's gone now.

So that's the solution for now if you have lots of boards and you use them for personal use and you don't need any business class workspace features.

However at some point in the next 12 - 24 months my guess is that there will be some restriction on how many free workspaces you can create.

[Michael Pryor]

This is our fault because the naming created the wrong perception but just for posterity the “personal” setting in Trello did not mean a board just for you.  We never had a setting that only allowed you to add yourself. 

The history is that when we added “Teams” (now workspaces) we labeled boards that were not in Teams as “personal”. But those boards could still have 100s of members. 

Also there are currently no plans to change the number of workspaces you can have.  It would be better not to put dates on conjecture like that because it too could create the wrong perception. 

[Janusz Siodmiak]

@Iain DooleyThank you for your swift answer. It's most appreciated.

[LouPhi]

Hi, I searched and it is not clear:
How many Workspaces can we have? I currently have 2: 1 personal with 23 boards (soon 10) + 1 company where i have 1 guest (a freelancer) with 2 boards.
a) how many workspaces can we have (free)?
b) can i create 2 personal workspaces? meaning workspace with just me as owner/user of the board in it.
c) is the total of 10 boards PER workspace or for ALL Workspace I have?
d)  What is the limit of amount of Lists per board and cards per list?
e) how to move a board from personal to company workspace ? is that even possible? pr from workspace to workspace?
f) Is it not smarter to charge by total volume of data we have? like unlimited workspaces, boards, cards, lists for free ...as long as the total date we own is not over 1 giga or so?
PS: have asked this via twitter @trellosupport + via helpdesk.

[Iain Dooley]

@Michael Pryor 

We never had a setting that only allowed you to add yourself. 

What I was referring to was a short period during the transition to workspaces where "personal boards" could only have yourself as a member, that is you didn't have to have boards as members of a "team" as they were called at the time, but if you attempted to invite someone else to the board you had to add the board to a "team" first. It only lasted a month or something, it had that little popup with the penguin et. al.

Also there are currently no plans to change the number of workspaces you can have.  It would be better not to put dates on conjecture like that because it too could create the wrong perception. 

My speculation about an impending limit on workspaces was based on your post recently where you said there is "currently no limit": [link May 29, 2021]

The use of the word "currently" lead me to believe that there was a pretty high probability that there would be a limit imposed at some point.

Which reminds me of the discussion about the word "yet" in High Fidelity ;)

[Iain Dooley]

@LouPhi to answer your questions:

> How many Workspaces can we have? I currently have 2: 1 personal with 23 boards (soon 10) + 1 company where i have 1 guest (a freelancer) with 2 boards.

> a) how many workspaces can we have (free)?

You can have unlimited Workspaces.

> b) can i create 2 personal workspaces? meaning workspace with just me as owner/user of the board in it.

Yes

> c) is the total of 10 boards PER workspace or for ALL Workspace I have?

Per workspace

> d)  What is the limit of amount of Lists per board and cards per list?

The short answer is "lots and lots". There are real published limits but they're very, very large. Your board begins to slow down when you have about 3000 cards in it, the hard limits vary slightly.

If you really want to read about it you can see some information on the upper limits of cards per board here, as far as I'm aware there is no published list limit but that would probably be in the thousands also:

https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/trello/guides/rest-api/limits/

> e) how to move a board from personal to company workspace ? is that even possible? pr from workspace to workspace?

Yep here you go:

https://help.trello.com/article/752-changing-the-workspace-to-which-a-board-belongs

> f) Is it not smarter to charge by total volume of data we have? like unlimited workspaces, boards, cards, lists for free ...as long as the total date we own is not over 1 giga or so?

In general I think SaaS businesses avoid what amounts to "charging for storage" because it commoditises their value proposition.

Rather, what Trello is doing is focusing on charging people when they are using Trello for commercial purposes; that is, if you're making money from Trello and have the types of problems that businesses have when managing a workspace, then the Business Class features should make sense and thus you will pay for them, while still allowing people to "organize anything" whether personal or professional.