Do you use Trello? 1
I do. Extensively. Trello’s kanban boards are quick and easy, don’t force you into anything and have many useful features. And… they are free. Unless you want a lot of bling, larger uploads or integrations. For me those were just not worth the upgrade to a gold or business plan.
But now I may be forced to spent some money on this.
As I mentioned before, I teaching myself Javascript by developing a “Trello GTD dashboard”. One of the features I want it to have is only to show cards with a scheduled date a set number of days before that date. Trello has only one date for a card: the due date. Couldn’t use that. If I (ab)used the due date as a scheduled date, then a card could not both be scheduled and have a due date. Bummer.
Another feature sorely lacking from Trello is the support for repeat activities. Like posting to this blog and publishing a message to my mailing list every week. Or do “backlog grooming” on my stuff box and other lists. Or the sessions of the agile coaching class I’m taking.
Last week (or the one before?) Trello announced a couple of new power-ups. I was so happy! The new power-ups include both a “Custom Fields” power-up and a “Card Repeater“. Exactly what I need!
Then came the anti-climax.
The “Card Repeater” power-up is not really available yet (even though they say “it’s here”). It’s in public beta and you have to sign up with a team to try it out. Immediately did. Haven’t heard back yet.
And the real bummer: when you are on a free plan, you can now only enable a single power-up per board. It seems that you don’t even get more power-ups when you have Trello Gold. That truly is a let down. Before this, your choice of power-ups was limited, but you could at least enable multiple power-ups, even as a free user.
This severely limits the usefulness of Trello for free and gold users.
It’s their prerogative of course. I understand their need to make money to keep improving Trello and to pay the support staff. And 10 USD a month doesn’t sound like an unreasonable amount to get some extra features. My beef with this is that many SaaS offerers use their free plans to jump start their subscriber numbers and then slowly but surely put the vice on to get them to cough up by increasingly limiting what’s available on the free plan.
Ah well, I’ll just have to do as I planned before: figure out a way to add this functionality without leaning on Trello features.
1 Disclosure: I get some Trello Gold credits if you sign up after using that link, if you don’t want me to enjoy that, use this link.
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