Introducing Trello Gold | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Trello Gold

blog.trello.com

127 pointsKiro86 comments

Meanwhile, I'm completely on board with this. Trello is used by a lot of people who make lots of money and want to throw some of it at Fog Creek because they're awesome, but it's also used by a lot of people who make not lots of money (in some cases zero money) and are organizing things like school projects and community service. (For example, I use Trello to organize all my homework, and a club I'm part of at school [with near-zero budget] used Trello to organize a big charity fundraising event.)

This lets the people who want to give Fog Creek money give them money, and get something in return, while letting people who can't afford to give Fog Creek money still use Trello for all the important stuff.

(Also, 250 MB file uploads are a legitimate feature worth paying for. Heck, even pretty backgrounds and stickers are an important feature for a lot of people, just maybe not HN-reading programmers.)

While your thinking here makes sense, it is better to honor truly Free as in freedom / Libre / Open Source software instead of funding proprietary software. FLOSS is also made by hard-working people and given away mostly and used by people who make money. But if you support FLOSS, your support goes to help everyone in the world, whereas if you fund proprietary software, you help advance something still under exclusive control by the company and not respecting everyone's freedoms.

It would be better if trello had servers I could download, but they don't. I like their system, but I don't trust them with life details like bank account numbers and such. (though trello really isn't for that, see last paragraph)

That said, being the heavy FLOSS zealot that I am, I don't have a problem with what trello is doing, per say. They're offering a service, and paying for a service is fine. Particularly a well executed service with good support.

The service they offer isn't just access to an application, though it's a shame they keep that application to themselves, they offer a hosted server and storage for everyone to access. There's nothing morally wrong with it.

Fog Creek has a github repo at least: https://github.com/fogcreek

I'm totally OK with paying companies to build useful proprietary stuff when they're spinning out a few open source artifacts now and then.

I upgraded the instant I saw it for 2 reasons:

1) I've been wanting a way to PAY for this service for a long time now so I know it's there year after year. I'm super happy to give them $5 per month.

2) I wanted pretty backgrounds.

I am what I am.

"I am what I am"

If you know what/who you are then that puts you way ahead of most people...

I've never understood the pure desire to give away one's money. In my book, parting with money is a significant thing that only comes after careful consideration and knowledge of clear benefits. Even then, I'm never happy to get rid of my money. The unpleasantness of giving up my money is simply outweighed by the utility of the thing I'm buying.

What is the reasoning as to why one would voluntarily give money when not absolutely necessary? It just seems odd that one would be happy simply because of that. (In commerce, that is. Charity is a different animal.)

Then again, I might be the weird one.

>What is the reasoning as to why one would voluntarily give money when not absolutely necessary?

Simple: something you value may go away if not funded.

If I helped you out in some way every month, month after month, week after week, day after day, you would presumably eventually feel like you were indebted to me in some way, correct? If I then gave you the opportunity to do something for me, you would gladly do so, especially if I were still doing something for you that was worth more to you than what you were doing for me, correct? Same principle.

Take a look at Google Reader. If they had let me pay for it I would have. They did not want my money and now it is gone.

I am rational consumer. I only pay to get something in return. Often I pay because I want to know someone is employed to keep updating the service or product. I don't really care if other people are freeloading.

Paid products gets cancelled as well.

>The unpleasantness of giving up my money is simply outweighed by the utility of the thing I'm buying.

Giving away money is also quite pleasurable to some. You could be supporting a product you like, hence increasing their chances of survival. You could be just buying something you don't necessarily need to help the person selling it, putting someone else's needs before yours, which generally feels good if done voluntarily. Finally, you're reducing attachment to your wealth, which reduces the importance of your bank balance in your happiness. That kind of attachment reduction leads to more personal freedom.

(a) I currently have more money than I need to cover my basic needs. (When I didn't have this, I didn't contribute to stuff.)

(b) I recognize that many of the free things I love couldn't exist or would be significantly worse without voluntary contributions.

(d) It makes me happy to help people who have freely shared their value with me.

FYI, your apparent lack of (d) is the reason you're getting downvotes. Nobody likes an ingrate. Lacking (a) is more socially acceptable, I think.

Can see it as a nice way to give them some money and sure, if you upload big files, useful. However, would really liked to have seen data encryption rather than stickers. Everything you do in Trello is stored in plan text. Not a huge fan of that.

After finally being convinced that this isn't a joke, I had a horrible revelation:

If Trello came with all of that by default, I would pay just as much to make it go away.

You'd pay money to get rid of some upload links? What, you have a second personality that would upload malicious stickers and emoji while you were sleeping?

Maybe he has team members who would try to use stickers as obnoxiously as possible?

Has it been confirmed that this isn't a joke?

If it was a joke you would earn coins for closing out a task and you could buy stickers with coins, except that the really fancy stickers would cost more coins than you could earn but then you could buy coins using a credit card ...

Ah, the lesser known "Sneetches" business model.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stories

As practised here:

http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/08/an-innovation-lesson-from-dr-se...

That's Trello Platinum, coming soon. Somebody pays $5 to add stickers to your board, then you pay $5 more to take them away.

That's sort of how the SomethingAwful forums work. You spend 5 bucks to buy someone an insulting avatar, they pay 5 bucks to remove it.

How nostalgic! My favorite was one user started a thread for pictures you find really unsettling, his example was a woman photoshopped to have four eyes and two mouths. By the time I started reading it, his avatar had already been changed to that exact picture, with the caption "sorry".

That was a cool monetization system. I remember you could also buy custom emojis, which would be fun for a while and then absolutely reviled :awesome:.

Two points on why stickers are a sneaky-good feature IMO

1) Trello is used by some as a digital Kanban board. A bit thing is Kanban is the idea of a "blocker" - on physical boards this is usually a big, in-your-face, bright red sticky note. The point is that it jumps out at you and gets the team to swarm in and address the issue. Trello didn't really have this before (yes, you could use labels but it wasn't obvious). Now you can slap a big WARNING sticker on the thing and people will notice.

2) Trello has been trying to move away from being strictly a tool for software developers. Look at the marketing home page - the example board is for an Art Project, not a software app. With people using Trello to plan weddings [1] or to help their kids with homework [2], they are aiming for a different market than techies. Ever have a chore list when you were a kid? And what did mom put on it when you did your chores and earned a reward? Yup, a sticker. Brilliant move if you ask me.

[1]: http://www.22ideastreet.com/blog/2013/09/12/the-tech-behind-...

[2]: http://heartofwisdom.com/blog/get-organized-with-trello-list...

Those stickers are literally spaceships and puppies, how can they be used for any serious work? There is nothing more obvious than a label, a colored rectangle with text denoting its meaning, instead you get this -> ;)

Besides the fact that some of these stickers are in fact useful for "serious work" (like "big red exclamation sign"), "serious work" isn't Trello's only target audience. And it's not like they took away the labels.

It's not a fact, I happen to find that exclamation sign too silly. I used Trello for keeping track of chores around the house, and I think more than 5 or 6 labels (what's so hard about adding more fields?) would be far more useful than these tacky emoji.

I'm just not into Trello Gold, I hate gaudy things.

I completely agree. Additional (unlimited?) labels would be a serious upgrade to Trello. It's a tool to help people get shit done - which it's very good at - but adding useless features like custom emojis don't assist in the core function.

My first reaction was just like everyone else's. I thought this is a joke. "After just about every chat app minus WhatsApp have added stickers, plus the recent inclusion of them in Path, now a productivity app?"

But it actually make a lot of sense. I think if you're already a Trello users, you're not the target market for this. Trello can be used in small families, among friends to help arrange things. Read: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3546-how-we-the-kims-use-base...

And this strikes right at the heart of it. It makes Trello less of a scary productivity app, and more of an everyday helper and organizer.

[trello co-creator, here]

Definitely not a joke :)

But also not something you need to buy. We're working very hard to make sure everybody understands that Trello is free and will always be free.

With that, we have to make money to support the development and servers. Our ultimate goal is that the 1% of people who get the most value out of Trello will pay us, and that will collectively bring in enough money to pay for the whole operation.

The people getting the most value out of Trello are organizations, and super-fans.

The organizations pay us by buying Trello Business Class (https://trello.com/business-class), which gets them advanced administrative features that organizations like to have.

The super-fans are people who really just want a way of showing their love for Trello and supporting the company, and that's who Trello Gold is for. They show us some love by either (a) paying us or (b) referring friends to Trello, and in exchange we give them some cute stickers and board backgrounds and a little crown thing on your avatar so they can show all their friends how cool they are.

We actually thought of calling it "Trello Fan Club."

Either way, the long term goal remains to keep Trello 100% free, but still have a way where the 1% of people who get the most value out of it can pay us. For those 1% it's an easy sell. There are people running their businesses on Trello and they've told us that if we sold a brown paper bag called Trello Brown Paper Bag they would buy it, just to support the software they love and make sure it has a future.

Hah it sounds like you guys had a lot of fun working on Trello Gold, building the feature that everyone seems to mock just for the fun of it.

Why is the idiom of offering it for free (100% that is) and then look out for supporting the development? How can you honestly do both? Instead, place it for 14 day trial, offer the entire thing cheaper by 99% (leave 1% fan club away), and support both the causes sufficiently.

From the blog post:

“What does Trello Gold mean for Business Class?” Nothing. They work totally independently. Trello Gold is for individuals and Business Class is for organizations.

https://trello.com/business-class

I have a hard time figuring out if it's a parody or if it's for real.

I honestly checked the date.

We're clearly months from April, so is there another prank date of which I'm not aware?

Well, this is awkward. Take a tool where I'd define two of its key points as being clean and simple (to look at and use), then charge money to add two fairly random features that mess up the look.

Everyone likes to bring out their individuality. I can definitely see a lot of users happily uploading personal pictures for board backgrounds.

Like MySpace? I think people should let their tools look the way the want it to, but it always goes downhill from there. It's one of those things where it's better to just keep it simple and standard looking.

If you want to keep it simple and standard looking, go ahead. I don't see that changing in any way.

A classic use case of the new feature for business users, would be using different board colors to easily differentiate between boards.

Just this would be a nice usability win.

You'd think so, but from when they said 'Trello Gold is for individuals' it sounds like it won't even be available to business accounts.

Board backgrounds could be useful if you have a lot of boards. Otherwise, it shouldn't be awkward at all, unless you want to give them money and are disappointed they didn't give you a reason to.

I'm pretty sure you don't have to use any of the features.

The real point is that it gives people who have money reason and excuse to pay for a tool they find useful and enjoyable. It doesn't really matter if the cat pictures in themselves are actually useful.

If Trello's user base is average people using iphone and want a fun todo list, this is brilliant. Nerds probably won't get it, but there is a reason that Geocities, Myspace, etc... were terribly popular - making ridiculous things that express your personality is fun for a lot of people.

Your examples would probably be more effective if you chose companies that didn't die and fall off the map.

In fact, it's been suggested that Facebook's clean and simple design gave the site an edge over Myspace's garish and annoying clutter.

Is this some analytics project of an intern or something. So strange, almost looks like a parody.

Oh well Trello is awesome that cannot be stressed enough :)

A lot of the features for Trello are worked on by interns actually, if you read the blog. Pretty good work so far!

Yeah! I'm so gonna pay for this. Talk about added value! The only thing left they need is an API that will let you send POST requests for stickers. Because APIs and SaaS's are cool! Who cares if it doesn't solves a pain?

I feel like I'm looking at MySpace circa 2006.

Oh man, my coworkers are gonna go nuts with this. We already have the thing that makes cards "age" if you don't do anything to them for a while. (I admit it's a cool idea, it just looks like hell.)

| It makes things look like hell.

... Which is why it's awesome and incredibly useful. It gives you a rough estimate of how long you've neglected a card.

I don't plan to use most of these features, but I upgraded purely because Trello has become an integral part of how I work and I want to see it stick around.

Though it's not April 1, I thought this must be a joke.

Not because these features don't make sense. They do. I know plenty of people who would love them.

Except those aren't the people who would pay for them.

Simply put, the sort of people who use emojis are definitely not the sort of people who pay for productivity software. Nerds (and generally "professionals") will pay for a Trello board. But nerds don't particularly like stickers.

Normals love stickers, but barely ever pay for anything—least of all subscription web services. Even today, I just don't see many teenage girls willing to toss $5 at a web productivity board.

It's just a sad and bizarre case of product-market mismatch.

It looks like this basically gives you the ability to customize the look for yourself. And add some custom things (stickers and emoji) will be visible by others, but not usable. Thankfully, it looks like a basic sticker set is available for free. While maybe tacky, I can see stickers being used to indicate things that labels are used for now, but they will be more obvious. Labels are a small color bar on the front of the card. Remembering what they mean can sometimes be difficult. Getting attention via a sticker is probably more obvious. But can we filter by stickers? Probably not.

I'd pay for Trello 3D. With music.

I'd pay for the ability to back date changes on the card logs

“What does Trello Gold mean for Business Class?” Nothing. They work totally independently. Trello Gold is for individuals and Business Class is for organizations

Getting upset that your Kanban board will get cluttered by stickers is missing the point.

(I think stickers are awesome. You might not think so, but I think so, and I'm generally inclined to give Trello my money. This, if nothing else, gives me a venue to do so.)

Honestly they appear to have found a nice way for me to personally give them money and get something in return. I don't have to use the features but the fact I can give them a little bit of money for a product that has had a massive impact on my day to day work and a small impact on my home life (mainly shopping lists) is cool.

Great great great product.

I think people are forgetting there's already a business class option for organizations that need more serious power usage. This isn't so odd when you take that into account. This seems like it's aimed at individual users or people who specifically want to have more fun in Trello but not necessarily more power.

I find Trello very tough to use with a team but great for keeping track of individual process. Asana (while very different) seems to work better with our team of 5.

I was hoping Trello Gold would have offered the things that keep us from using Trello in the first place because I really do like the the Kanban method.

Mind elaborating on specific details/workflow that you find superior in Asana compared to Trello?

Sure. The most obvious one is that you can't filter by user (or at least it wasn't readily apparent that you could).

I also think the keyboard shortcuts on Asana are faster and more intuitive. Don't get me wrong - I love Trello's layout and Kanban - but it feels very light in comparison to Asana (which some probably consider a positive).

You can filter by user in Trello... even using keyboard shortcuts! It's right on the Filter menu, and the handy "q" keyboard shortcut filters to your own cards.

I wrote a site called reportfortrello.com where you can see each member's time and how many tasks they worked on. I hope you try it before giving up on Trello.

Hrm. Scanning the comments here, this is not a joke. Weird. To me, wouldn't larger board uploads be a good enough up-sell to pay 5 bucks for? This sticker/background thing just seems strange.

Is this real? If it is, the stickers look over sized for the small boards.

is this the basic idea, give trello a bunch of money and what you get in return is some cheesy-ass backgrounds and clip-art?

This seems to be right in line with the business model for Path.

But Trello is way more useful.

Add a couple basic reports and I would pay $20/mo without question.

Yeah, drives me nuts there's zero reporting/analytics. Considering leaving Trello altogether because of this.

Jira has a kanban feature now (Greenhopper, I think?). I have seriously considered it, although I am fearful of the ability for PMs and clients to use Jira's bazillion other features to make my workflow process hell. I do enjoy Trello's forced fluidity, and cannot wait to port my last few clients off redmine (love the project, kanban fits my flow 1000x better).

GreenHopper has just been renamed to JIRA Agile recently.

I agree, for customers, Trello > redmine.

Hi, I am making them! I created reportsfortrello.com. I am adding new stuff all the time. Let me know what you need and I'll add it if I can.

This must be a joke.

How about custom label colors?

Gold is best. Best best best.

wat

Is it April 1st again???

Trello, if you want a life-long subscriber, please bring Trello to BlackBerry x10 users.

Love this "gold" feature btw!

I can pretty much promise we are never going to do a BlackBerry app.

I can pretty much promise I'll never use Trello again.

Wow, that was a quick reversal.

2 years of people clamoring for better labels, and instead they go with these useless, tacky stickers?

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