Hacker News Reader

Comment by c1u | Hacker News Reader

I love Trello, but cannot commit to using it more for business until I have an expectation of service, which comes from paying for it. They're awesome, but they owe me nothing, and that's just too risky.

View on HN

You know, I've had a fair number of services that I'm paying for just vanish out from under me, too (e.g., eWorld, iTools, Grove.io, the original Siri). Sometimes the wind-down is longer, sometime it isn't. And, conversely, some things I don't pay for have been around for a very, very long time (Freenode, Gmail, my old Fidonet BBS, etc.). Maybe paid sticks around longer on average, but I think paid-v.-free is a bad litmus test.

I think there's a much better one: how easy it is to take your data and go home. With Trello, the answer is "exceedingly easy." On any board, just go to "Options" -> "Share, Print, Export..." and dump the entire board to JSON. From there, it should be easy to move your data onto Remember the Milk, Pinterest, org-mode, or whatever's appropriate for you. You can even automate grabbing that JSON on a daily basis via the API, if you're so inclined.

So while I understand your argument, your actual risk here is very, very low.

As another Creeker pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the Trello team has some stuff coming out in the future that you may find appealing, if you would feel better contractually paying for stuff. But in terms of risk, I think that it can be very low, today, whether you pay or not.

On the other hand, you have a better argument when the service goes down temporarily. They're more likely to respond quickly if they have paying customers.

That may be fair. In this particular case, I can tell you we respond to Trello outages the same we'd respond to FogBugz or Kiln outages, so your concern should be minimal.

Ah, didn't realize you were a Fog Creek employee yourself :)

http://status.fogcreek.com/2012/10/diesel-bucket-brigade-mai... I came in to work and was shocked that Trello was offline since I use it as my todo list in work. Then I read the stories as to why and was again shocked when it was only offline for a day or so. Fog Creek are awesome.

We were only offline for a few hours. Self-imposed (and turned out it wasn't necessary but in the fog of war at that moment, was the decision we made).

Nice, even better than I thought, after I saw the news I don't think I checked again that day, didn't seem likely to me that in all that chaos that Trello would be a priority. Happy to be proved wrong of course.

Good points. I've been pushing Trello for our team internally and almost everyone who's had a chance to use it so far loves it. We've even started using it with clients for QA and most clients really like it. Only one client hates it, but they are one of those rare poison-clients we really want to fire. Maybe Trello could even be a great way to qualify new clients :P

I hadn't even noticed the export features and now that I've taken I look a lot of my concerns seem much less important. Thanks!

Still trying to figure out how to effectively use the "due date" feature though. When a card's checklist is complete it still shows as past due. Not a dealbreaker at all though, we'll figure out how to make it work.

I think there is little risk of Trello being discontinued/FogCreek going out of business. They do a lot of hiring and have had a pretty vocal customer segment pleading for them to charge for it. I don't really understand why they haven't tho I'm sure Joel Spolsky has a plan.

Disclaimer: I wish he was charging--I have a similar project I've been working on over nights and weekends. It is very hard to compete with free and difficult to position/market a product you have created to appeal to everyone. That being said--I love working on my project so it'll be around for a long time... Link: http://www.thetaboard.com

Haha, "too big to fail".

Every company can fail tomorrow. Free or paid.

This argument sounds reasonable. I wonder if it is true though. Businesses that are paid for their services can vanish as well. The question is, if the probability is really lower for paid services compared to free services.

There's one simple solution for that: A hosted version.

Too bad they don't provide that.

I wonder how many versions of FogBugz they will still release as hosted version before they only offer it hosted.

That makes sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com