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Comment by LeafStorm | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

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.

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.

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