Will trello ever target low-end users rather than those who use it to manage their businesses?
Asked by Kyle Ford:

I myself use this platform for a roleplay community, so curious if trello would ever try to target users who want to use it on the lower end with maybe a workspace member limit?


Answers:
author: Michael Pryor
body: Doesn't Trello already do that? Our free version is pretty robust, and we just introduced a cheaper paid plan.

comments: author: Gangleider
body: I'm in a similar situation and also "forced" into the free tier if I want to use Trello for my team, so perhaps I can explain assuming our situations are similar. It's a long read, so feel free to skip it - but I thought it might offer some insight.

I feel like a lot of smaller, community-based organizations - especially at a hobby level that don't focus on turning a profit - fall between the cracks with a per-user licensing model.

I'm a big fan of Trello and use it at work, which makes it my first choice in my hunt for a solution that fits my team. The standard plan has many features that would be incredibly helpful for us and I'd happily pay for it, but since we aren't a business and rely on voluntary contributions we simply don't have the budget to work with a monthly, per-user licensing model unless I cut out all but one to three users.

Almost my entire team including myself are volunteers. They work on their own terms, in their free time, and we cannot demand the same level of dedication as the average (small) business would - some want to help, but can't commit more than say, an hour a day or every few days. This significantly reduces the amount of value we get from paying for individual seats, since we need a **lot** more of them to match the productivity levels of even the smallest traditional teams. Most of them are still in high school or college. They (typically) aren't nearly as skilled, experienced or motivated as someone in a paid position, which again greatly reduces their output and the only realistic way to combat this is to increase the size of our team.

To give you an idea of the numbers I'm working with:

Myself  
3 "project managers" (with no project management experience :))  
4 developers/sysadmins  
2 artists  
25 moderators/general volunteers - a large subset of which work on small projects together and would immensely benefit from centralized planning.

Anywhere from 30 to 50 users or at the absolute minimum 7-8, that won't always be actively using the platform. Some will only use it for a few minutes a day, or one or two hours per week. Neither of those options fit within our budget.

Even a team of 2-3 full-timers would probably get more work done. I'm not arguing the value there, but it simply isn't comparable for us.

There probably isn't much revenue to be made from people like me, but it gets people familiar with the product. It's thanks to my workplace using it that I'd ever even have thought of it. The majority of my team has never used any kind of collaboration software, and Trello would be the perfect introduction.

I'll see if I can make the free tier work for us somehow or look for an alternative, but I figured I'd offer you some perspective into what I assume is not a negligible demographic, given that I find myself here two days later than the author of this thread.


author: Michael Pryor
body: Thanks for the explanation and the detail. Super helpful.   

Most of the features available in Gold are now actually free. Unlimited Power-Ups was the big one. But also the personalization features. The only one that maybe would affect you now that didn't if you were paying for Gold would be the file upload size limit, but presumably any cloud provider allows you to work around that. Getting around the ten board limit for free Workspaces was NOT actually a feature of Gold (although I suspect some people may not realize that) but people can still make more workspaces, free or otherwise.   

This may mean we don't have a way to make revenue off of people in your situation who can pay a little but not for all the people that collaborate with them. But I don't think anything is worse for Gold users that were using Trello - since Almost all the features went to free. In other words, the free tier IS Gold now for most purposes.


author: Gangleider
body: Thanks for taking the time to reply in detail.

The board limit is my primary constraint. Don't get me wrong - I do think this is one of the better implementations of a free tier I've seen in project management tools, and after some more playing around with ideas I think I can make it work for us, it's just going to take some creativity.

I definitely think it was a positive change overall in terms of structuring the plans, it's just a shame for me (and I know you can't please everyone) that there's no intermediate step between the two price points or an alternative metric to headcount to base it on, even if it means giving up on some of the smaller luxuries.