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Comment by dclaysmith | Hacker News Reader

I developed a similar product over the last few years (http://www.thetaboard.com) and have been waiting to see how the FogCreek guys were going to monetize Trello. I had resigned to leaving my product as free in the face of such a free, strong market leader. Now that Trello has established a price/feature point, I'm tempted to to crank out some features and see if I can't monetize it.

Trello have been pretty transparent that they would eventually offer some sort of premium package in the future but they kept adding so many free features that it was getting harder to imagine what kind of features they could actually charge for. The features they are charging here are nice but they aren't real game changers and I thought they had already offered some of them (data export, Google integration).

All that being said, I think Trello is a great product and I'm sure they'll pay for more than a few nights at the pub with this new revenue stream!

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Regardless of Trello's pricing plan, I think you should and have the opportunity to charge.

1) even though everyone on HN seems to, not everyone in the world knows about Trello.

2) Trello isn't your only competitor. The most popular online project management tool in the traditional, offline world is probably Basecamp. They charge (and make a killing).

3) many people who do know about Trello don't want to use it for one reason or another. Before today the biggest reason I saw was their lack of a monetization strategy, but there are still likely a good number of folks on HN who want something similar but aren't satisfied with Trello.

One potential route for you to take, that I've noticed any time Trello comes up here, is to offer customers installation of ThetaBoard on their own servers.

Perhaps make it more specific? Trello for ___ ?

This is the route I'm taking at ClinchPad (http://www.clinchpad.com) which is basically Trello for Sales. It was originally inspired by Trello. :)

looks neat. is it doing well?

Yes, I'm pretty happy with the progress so far! :)

Trying out ThetaBoard right now. It's funny, it's sort of like Trello with everything I want to change about the Trello design – no pop-ups (edit in place), black/grey color scheme, cleaner typography – but then it ends up feeling more complex and busy.

I think click anywhere to open/close a card would be a huge help. Having two or more cards is confusing and destroys the 'overview' feeling that makes kanban great.

We could use more kanban products anyway – keep it up and monetize!

Thanks. Yeah, I really really wanted to avoid popups and modals etc, but it introduces new problems.

Double clicking on the background will close all of the cards.

ThetaBoard looks great, well done!

The model that seems to be working for social collaboration software and what Trello has announced, is the majority of user features are free while admin/control features fall into the paid version. Yammer's business model is not too different with admin/control features at the core of the paid version.

Organizations are willing to pay for control while users are less willing to pay for features.

If you can get widespread adoption by free users there's increased pressure on Management to signup for the control features. Someone else coined this as "Enterprise sales by the backdoor".

We're looking at a simliar model with http://www.taskmessenger.com

* edit for spelling

Cool. I hadn't really considered going this route--was always trying to use a combination of: # of collaborators, # of projects, # users per organization, etc and none of them really felt right. Will give the increased admin features some thought.

Task Messenger looks slick.

Looks really great. I'd optimize for some specific niche. What did you use for client-side? Love the drag and drop.

Thanks! I wanted to avoid optimizing. When I started working on it (before Trello came out) I wanted something really general purpose with no forced workflow, etc. I could customize it but that's not what I really wanted to build so I've resisted.

It uses backbone.js models/views, Jquery UI, and some Twitter Bootstrap JS.

I'm trying to remember why I didn't like Trello, and IIRC I didn't like how it looked/worked after you had 10+ cards per column. Perhaps optimize for people that have many cards? I don't know if having many cards happen in the Scrum process though...

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