
Introducing Trello Business Class - lispython
http://blog.trello.com/introducing-business-class/
======
dclaysmith
I developed a similar product over the last few years
(<http://www.thetaboard.com>) and have been waiting to see how the FogCreek
guys were going to monetize Trello. I had resigned to leaving my product as
free in the face of such a free, strong market leader. Now that Trello has
established a price/feature point, I'm tempted to to crank out some features
and see if I can't monetize it.

Trello have been pretty transparent that they would eventually offer some sort
of _premium_ package in the future but they kept adding so many _free_
features that it was getting harder to imagine what kind of features they
could actually charge for. The features they are charging here are nice but
they aren't real game changers and I thought they had already offered some of
them (data export, Google integration).

All that being said, I think Trello is a great product and I'm sure they'll
pay for more than a few nights at the pub with this new revenue stream!

~~~
cooperadymas
Regardless of Trello's pricing plan, I think you should and have the
opportunity to charge.

1) even though everyone on HN seems to, not everyone in the world knows about
Trello.

2) Trello isn't your only competitor. The most popular online project
management tool in the traditional, offline world is probably Basecamp. They
charge (and make a killing).

3) many people who do know about Trello don't want to use it for one reason or
another. Before today the biggest reason I saw was their lack of a
monetization strategy, but there are still likely a good number of folks on HN
who want something similar but aren't satisfied with Trello.

One potential route for you to take, that I've noticed any time Trello comes
up here, is to offer customers installation of ThetaBoard on their own
servers.

~~~
swah
Perhaps make it more specific? Trello for ___ ?

~~~
cmadan
This is the route I'm taking at ClinchPad (<http://www.clinchpad.com>) which
is basically Trello for Sales. It was originally inspired by Trello. :)

~~~
vijayr
looks neat. is it doing well?

~~~
cmadan
Yes, I'm pretty happy with the progress so far! :)

------
beat
Mmm, Trello. It's the ONLY software Kanban implementation I've used that's
worth a crap. All the rest either feel like broken toys, or suffer from
feeping creaturitis, or both.

Note to other Kanban software developers... features suck. "Features" are the
antithesis of Kanban.

That said, though, even Trello isn't as good as a board with Post-It notes
attached. Its only real advantage is that Trello is portable.

~~~
swanson
A big part of Kanban is Work-In-Progress (WIP) limits on columns - something
that most tools leave out.

It is a pain in the butt when a column is at the WIP limit - but that is kind
of the point. It forces you to help move blockages before overloading a
column.

~~~
ktsmith
Blossom.io does this and is similar in functionality to trello. I was using it
for a few weeks on their early adopter $9/mo plan but got tired of having to
reload the app a dozen times a day when they pushed new versions.

~~~
tosh
Thanks a lot for the mention (Blossom co-founder here). We care a lot about
keeping things simple while encouraging a great Kanban experience (including
WIP limits, cycle time, …). I think of Blossom as the minimum viable Kanban
experience with emphasis on the philosophy, not the 'features'.

Too many people building project management tools don't realize that features
often just support anti-patterns and having more of them doesn't help.

I believe people building software _tools_ should internalize that a huge part
of providing a good solution is helping people get better at their craft & day
to day on top of providing the software itself :)

------
graeme
If they included some kind of offline support, I would pay $200 in a
heartbeat.

I often have work that I do offline, and I disconnect the internet so as to
avoid having to use willpower to stay away from the internet.

I'm sure they're aware it would be useful, but concluded the number of users
it would apply to doesn't justify the effort. But, in case they're considering
offline support, wanted to add my anecdote.

I don't necessarily need to access all my boards and cards while offline, I'd
like like to be able to add cards or modify cards I had open without losing
those changes.

~~~
arkitaip
Trello works in offline mode. Just create cards or edit existing ones and it
gets uploaded when you have an Internet connection. Tried it today and it just
works.

~~~
graeme
Oh, is this a recent change? The last time I tried, it had a message along the
lines of 'connection down, changes you make now may not be saved'

And then some of the changes were not saved, I tested.

~~~
hamidpalo
Trello does not support offline operation. It may work sometimes but offline
sync is not a feature of any of the official clients.

------
dave1619
I'm curious why they priced the ceiling at just $200/year for organizations,
no matter how large.

Are they targeting smaller businesses?

~~~
Terretta
Can be put on someone's corporate card w/o budget approval. Dramatically cuts
down red tape, so dramatically increases the number of corps that will readily
sign up.

~~~
orthecreedence
Not to mention different teams _within_ a corporation will probably have their
own accounts due to communication issues.

------
goronbjorn
Love using Trello at work, and this makes it even better.

My one gripe (that many people have) is the lack of built-in metrics/analytics
on progress. You can hack it together with a combination of the Trello Scrum
extension and their API, but it would be great to have it built-in (and
something I would pay for).

~~~
swombat
There is a full-featured API... it shouldn't be too hard to code up some open-
source (or even paid) apps that pull stats out of Trello...

~~~
goronbjorn
Totally agree. It wouldn't be too hard for someone to build a lightweight
frontend to their API with a d3/raphael charting capability.

~~~
napoleond
I would happily build this, but I'm not currently a heavy Trello user. Are you
envisioning a browser plug-in or a separate site? What sort of stats would you
want to see?

------
r4dius
I was hoping this would be an announcement about self-hosting, but alas...
That's still the barrier-to-entry for the company I work for; can't use any
"cloud" products. JIRA is just so painfully bloated.

~~~
tghw
Knowing what I do about Fog Creek (which includes no specific information on
this particular question) I would very much doubt they would ever do that. The
support costs for self hosting are just too high to justify the expense. Often
these costs come in more than a support tech's time, as certain problems
require code base changes to fix.

Do you have some sort of governmental regulation that keeps you from using
hosted products?

~~~
jessaustin
Even secrecy-minded orgs like the CIA are moving apps to these platforms.
Typically a regulation won't say "no cloud", but e.g. FISMA would require an
online infrastructure to pass certain third-party assessments.

------
namityadav
This is a great move by Fog Creek! $20/month is so cheap that I can consider
getting Trello Business Class without much thinking.

As opposed to Asana, where I try to stay within the limits of the free
offering, because their cheapest paid offering is still expensive at
$100/month ( <http://asana.com/product#pricing> ).

~~~
jackiebo
We (Asana) just introduced a cheaper tier today: <http://asana.com/pricing>
for $50

~~~
namityadav
Wait, did you just reduce the max number of free members from 30 to 15, and
start charging $50/month for 15-30 members. Something that was free till now.
That's definitely not the right way to respond to the Trello announcement.

------
dfischer
We've been working on www.kanbanpad.com for a while (before Trello). If you're
looking for an alternative check us out. We are free.

------
ereckers
Perfect timing. I was looking to make a recommendation to move away from a
current method of maintaining a Google Docs spreadsheet as a project tracker
(not good). I really wanted to suggest something simple like Trello (which I
use a ton internally at my own business).

------
aymeric
My congratulations to the Trello team. They are doing a great job there.

I am surprised they decided to monetize Trello that way rather than selling
Power-ups (add module like time tracking to your boards), they would be able
to reach a broader market.

Because I run a product that takes some inspiration from the Trello UI
(<http://weekplan.net>), I find it interesting to follow how they monetize
Trello. I went with the freemium model with a paid plan (like Evernote)
because I want to enjoy the free marketing I get from my free users and it is
working ok for me at the moment. I am itching to go the "X weeks trial then
have to pay" route as an experiment though as everyone is doing that these
days.

~~~
gecko
That's what they are doing. This is the first power-up.

------
RyanMcGreal
Is there currently a way to get bulk data out of Trello using the API?

~~~
dclaysmith
If you append .json to the URL of a Board you can download it as json. Not
really an answer to your question but...

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I did not know that, and it definitely helps! Thank you.

------
zachgersh
Hoping that they publish some registration numbers after the Business plan has
been around for a little bit, interested to see how many people will opt to
pay.

Now, the really interesting question will be how much time do they spend
adding free versus business features in the coming months? Does free start to
get no new features? What makes a feature a business feature over a free
feature?

EDIT - Removed my surprise about no backlash since I am geting negative points
for it.

~~~
jjg
Joel wrote a blog post* today about the introduction of Business Class. He
says:

"In the future we'll continue to add free features to Trello (there is a lot
of exciting stuff in the hopper)—anything that is a common feature, useful to
anyone, will be free. We’ll also continue to develop new Business Class
features that help large organizations manage Trello, and we may come up with
other things to sell to people who are getting a lot of value out of Trello. "

* <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2013/04/30.html>

~~~
zachgersh
I read the post and it doesn't mention the split. It's great that they have
more features to dev and I am sure FogCreek will do right by its customers.
The point I am interested in though is how they will now balance their time
between the feature sets.

