Effects of the May 20th change to workspaces
Asked by Lisa Nalewak:

Hello,

I use a free Trello account to manage creative workflow for my small creative team. We have 5 different boards in total, in my one workspace.

With your May 20th changes announcement, I saw that we need to limit collaborators to 12 come May 20th, and that is no problem.

But I am super concerned about this language; "On May 20, boards in this Workspace will become view only. " My team (12 of us over any month, 4 of us on a daily basis) need ongoing edit access to all the cards we have previously created (over our last 5 years of use) on all 5 of our boards so we can edit titles, descriptions, attachments, add comments, etc. and move them from column to column, board to board on a daily basis.

**My question is this**: If we stay on the free product, will we maintain the access we have now to all the cards we've created come May 20th? Or we will need to recreate all the cards we did previously in order to access their content moving forward? Or is the only way we can maintain editorial access to these previous cards through an upgrade to a paid product? Or is this view-only-access issue relevant to collaborators #13+ on a board, and not collaborators #1-12?

We've got hundreds of cards organized across different columns on each board, as well as archived items on each board. Being locked out of editorial access to any of these previous cards would be a Really. Really. Big. Deal. So I want to avoid this at all costs. Just need to know what to expect, so I know what I have to do to prepare correctly.

Thanks for your clarification!

- Lisa


Answers:
author: Rasmus Wulff Jensen
body: Your question is a bit hard to follow, you say you need to reduce to 12 users, but the new limit is 10 users so where do you get the 12 from?

But if you are 12 users that all need to access and edit all 5 boards, you can't stay free and need to upgrade to standard where you need to pay for 12 users (5$/Month on a yearly plan)... If some of the 12 only access a single of the 5 boards you can avoid paying for those on a paid plan (the single guest feature)

Regarding may 20th, if you do nothing things will go into read-only mode, but the cards will never be lost... But editorial access will only be restored after you pay or reduce number of user to 10 or less

But in general:

I've made this 10 min video on how the new rules work via various examples: <https://youtu.be/rqmCHU_QxY8>

comments: author: Lisa Nalewak
body: Thanks very much for the reply, and the clarification.

My revised question would then be:

After May 20th, with 10 users, using the free product, will my 10 collaborators, including myself, still be able to access/edit/move/manage each of my already existing cards on each of my 5 boards, within my single workspace, OR will the cards be read only (and not be editable/movable/manageable), precipitating the need to upgrade to the paid product to get that type of access back?  

After reading your response, I believe I would still be able to use the platform as I do today with the free account, as long as my collaborator count was kept to 10 or less.

Is this correct?


author: Rasmus Wulff Jensen
body: That is correct... If you reduce the total amount of users to 10 or lower the current warning message on top of the board will go away and nothing will happen on May 20th.

But bear in mind future budget-wise that if your team grows an 11th user, then you need to start paying for all 11 users.