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Comment by spolsky | Hacker News Reader

We plan to offer add-on and premium services that might be of use to people who are getting a lot of value out of Trello already. For example you could imagine that large corporations that already have Trello throughout their organization might be happy to pay for centralized administration utilities.

(PS I'm the founder of Fog Creek, creator of Trello)

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Thanks for the quick anwser. Any chance to have a download version anytime? I mean, a pay to download is totally acceptable. I'm asking this from a European points of view as Personal information could be stored into trello and Personal data protection laws in Europe are somehow different and more binding than the US ones.

I think I can confidently say that we will never offer that. The engineering costs are prohibitive and not cost-effective, even if you can charge the companies that need it.

That said, if there are things that we can do to increase privacy while still hosting Trello on our own servers, we'll certainly consider those. I never want to commit to any particular feature, but it is not impossible that one day we will provide IP whitelisting (so a given board is only available from approved IPs) or even client-side encryption. I should reiterate that neither of those features are in our near-term plans, but at least they are not completely out of the question. Having been in the downloaded software business for ten years, I can safely say though, that we are never doing that again.

I can confidently say we'll never use Trello if we can't host it locally; integrate it into our directory system, back it up and manage upgrades on our own timeline, and have the assurance that it will continue to be accessible even if you as a company are not.

It's unfortunate that there's no meeting in the middle.

Some of the planned business features would be able to meet you in the middle, but like Joel said, we have no plans to ever sell a self hosted version. We understand that means some companies' policies will prevent some people from using Trello, but its a tradeoff we made.

As an aside, I suspect a few of the companies who, in the past, could "never" use software that wasn't installed on their own systems are probably using Salesforce now.

It's not that we have inflexible arbitrary rules, but rather, considered reasoning as to why we don't want to depend on externally hosted services, and sufficient competitors in most spaces that are willing to provide self-hosted products. Companies such as Atlassian even go so far as to provide the source code, as do others, which has allowed us to maintain critical (non-atlassian) services well past the time they were discontinued by their parent company.

How many years do we have left with FogBugz before you kill the download version?

We are in the middle of getting Safe Harbor certified, which allows us to comply with all EU Data Protection laws, so that should no longer be an impediment for you.

One big problem with Trello at the moment is that it doesn't support multiple accounts (in the same way as Google do for example). I saw an interview somewhere claiming you use Trello for both personal and work stuff, and can't figure out how unless you use one account for both which is very bad practise.

You could use different browsers but that is a pain. And even that solution wouldn't work on mobile where you would have to keep logging out and back in again (really tedious, won't get notifications, impossible for users like me who don't even know our passwords as they are stored in a password manager).

This ultimately forces me to use Trello for work (and only one work at that) or personal but not both. In this day and age multiple accounts should really be standard (I'm looking at you Dropbox) but if you can't at least let work pay so I can have a practical personal account too.

Even with one account, you can put all your work-related boards in an organization and keep them separate from your personal boards that way. It's not exactly the same as the way Google does it.

I assume Dropbox doesn't allow multiple accounts because it would become a trivial workaround to their storage limits and seriously cut into the number of people they can get to upgrade to the premium version.

> Even with one account, you can put all your work-related boards in an organization and keep them separate from your personal boards that way.

But that means the credentials, access logs etc of one account are being used for both work and personal data. If for example the account you use is a work one (using Trello's google account login) then should you leave/be terminated by the company then they will disable/delete that account and now you've lost access to your personal stuff too. The other way around where work grants your personal account access to the organisation boards severely increases the risk as you'll have your personal account tied to more devices and people than a work account. For example it wouldn't be unreasonable to let your spouse know your personal account details, or to have your account also set up on one of their devices, or on shared family computers.

> I assume Dropbox doesn't allow multiple accounts ...

You can actually use multiple accounts - they just don't make it convenient. You can definitely run multiple instances of the dropbox client providing they are setup to have different home directories. This is somewhat trivial on Linux and more difficult on the other platforms. When accessing the dropbox site they have a half hearted attempt at multiple account support, but it is better to login/out and use one account at a time.

What they should do is let you enter multiple accounts in the client software. It is fine if that is only allowed with paid accounts.

I should also add that if you are using personal accounts for work boards then the work administrators have to keep a mapping somewhere (eg johnny45@hotmail.com is john.doe@company.com) and that the employee leaving means having to go through and find all the personal accounts and remove them from any company boards. This is a logistical nightmare!

By the way, are there any plans to integrate Mozilla Persona on your sites? I much prefer it to all the other alternatives, including OpenID.

Like many folks I've been burned a number of times when I locked into software that was "free forever". Usually not because the software owner put up a paywall, but because the business was found unsustainable and it was either sold or they pulled the plug.

I love Trello immensely but the "free forever" aspect worries me about trusting it over the longterm. I've tried to turn my clients onto Trello and have been met with the same skepticism over entrusting an entire business workflow to a free product. Just from a trust perspective, it would honestly put my mind at ease to find out it was making a buck somehow...

This was my thought too. Perhaps Trello is one of those strange cases where making the product more restrictive (eg. you must pay to create more than 500 cards) would increase the demand for the product.

Our team was about to migrated to Trello from Asana, but somehow we kept using Asana. I've heard similar stories recently where Trello is not that useful for startups but excellent for large corporations. One can expect what could be there future business model.

P.S We're team of 5 idiots looking for one more :)

Our startup team migrated from Asana to Trello. The main problem with Asana was that it worked well write only - ie it was easy to get lots of stuff in there, but things never got (re)organized to reflect reality which was probably a side effect of things rarely got read. Trello makes it considerably easier to see what is going on and to rearrange.

(That all said, Asana may have updated their interface since we left.)

We're not a large organisation - we have 16 people in the team and various clients using Trello and, as you can see in the post, it's a perfect tool for our us.

Everyday I use Asana for a client, and every minute I'm using it I'm wishing it was Trello

I use Trello and would love to see some basic stats. I've thought about writing something against the API that can output stats such as how long cards are staying in specific columns but I don't have the time to do it right atm.

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