Introducing Trello Gold

http://blog.trello.com/introducing-trello-gold-board-backgrounds-stickers-and-more/

by Kiro • 13 years ago

127 86 13 years ago

blog.trello.com

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.

avenger1232• 13 years ago

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

yogo• 13 years ago

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.

bgertonson2• 13 years ago

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.

rhizome• 13 years ago

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

rwallace• 13 years ago

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.

julien_c• 13 years ago

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

jwarren• 13 years ago

I honestly checked the date.

prawn• 13 years ago

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

gmack• 13 years ago

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

adrr• 13 years ago

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

badman_ting• 13 years ago

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.)

KurtMueller• 13 years ago

| 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.

LeafStorm2• 13 years ago

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.)

quadrangle• 13 years ago

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.

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

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.

dpritchett• 13 years ago

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.

dpcan• 13 years ago

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.

randomhunt• 13 years ago

"I am what I am"

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

ruswick• 13 years ago

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.

glennos• 13 years ago

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.

AznHisoka• 13 years ago

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?

gdilla• 13 years ago

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

chao-• 13 years ago

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.

jacalata2• 13 years ago

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?

scott_karana• 13 years ago

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

jenius• 13 years ago

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

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

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 ...

buro9• 13 years ago

Ah, the lesser known "Sneetches" business model.

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

James_Duval• 13 years ago

As practised here:

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

tedunangst• 13 years ago

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

cgag• 13 years ago

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.

pkrumins• 13 years ago

wat

kriro• 13 years ago

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 :)

wikwocket• 13 years ago

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

plg• 13 years ago

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?

caioariede• 13 years ago

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

lifeformed• 13 years ago

How about custom label colors?

rywalker• 13 years ago

This must be a joke.

programminggeek• 13 years ago

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.

freyr• 13 years ago

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.

swanson• 13 years ago

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...

ulisesrmzroche3• 13 years ago

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 -> ;)

LeafStorm2• 13 years ago

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.

bgertonson2• 13 years ago

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.

contextual2• 13 years ago

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

Love this "gold" feature btw!

gecko• 13 years ago

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

contextual2• 13 years ago

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

swombat• 13 years ago

Is it April 1st again???

mead5432• 13 years ago

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

But Trello is way more useful.

ulisesrmzroche3• 13 years ago

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

Finbarr• 13 years ago

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.

mgrouchy• 13 years ago

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.

thomasd2• 13 years ago

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.

spolsky2• 13 years ago

[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.

thomasd2• 13 years ago

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.

ThinkEzy• 13 years ago

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.

hackula12• 13 years ago

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

dshanahan• 13 years ago

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

hackula12• 13 years ago

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).

ibstudios3• 13 years ago

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.

nilkn• 13 years ago

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.

awjr• 13 years ago

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.

weisser2• 13 years ago

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.

giovannibajo1• 13 years ago

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

weisser2• 13 years ago

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).

ibstudios3• 13 years ago

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.

jmduke• 13 years ago

“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.)

torbit• 13 years ago

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

dsego• 13 years ago

Gold is best. Best best best.

morgante• 13 years ago

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.

Introducing Trello Gold

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