Running a public board with different user permissions

[Nadia]

Hello,

I'm trying to figure out whether Trello would be a good use case for a public roadmap that I want to set up for my product.

I'd like the board to be publicly visible, but I only want paid members to be able to vote and comment.

Paid members would be sent an invite link granting them the necessary permissions, and if their subscription lapses, an API request would be sent to Trello to revoke their extra permissions.

Is this possible, or should I perhaps look to another tool?

Thank you very much,

Nadia

[Nadia]

Okay, Mike! Thank you very much for your time on this! :-)

[Mike]

This is a good resource to help understand who is and isn't billable: https://help.trello.com/article/855-how-billing-works-with-trello-business-class

Observers is just a permission status, so doesn't particularly have anything to do with if someone's billable; that's all determined by other factors. An Observer could be a paid member or a free Guest!

Two factors that make a member billable

1) You add that person to _the Business Class Team_, and I don't think you'll be doing that

2) You add a non-team member to multiple boards in your Team.

If you only ever add people to this one specific board, they'll be free. If you created a second type of Roadmap board, and invited some of the same members from the first to the second, you'd be charged for them as Multi-Board Guests, and you'd also see a warning before adding them and being charged!

[Nadia]

Hi Mike,

Thank you very much for your response!

I see that Business Class pricing starts at $9.99 per user per month. Does that include Observers?

I'm going to have thousands of those to start!

Thank you,

Nadia

[Mike]

Hi Nadia,

You could definitely do that—you'd configure your board permissions so that only members of the board can comment and vote. This way, public users could _view_ the board, but only those people that you add to the board could comment.

You can then interface with Trello's API to remove members as you see need: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/trello/rest/api-group-boards/#api-boards-id-members-idmember-delete

The one challenge to be aware of, is that on a Free team, those people that you add to the board will have full permission to the board. They'll be able to comment, to vote, to add new cards, and to delete existing cards. You'd need Business Class in order to add people as read-only Observers. You can configure Observers to be able to comment and vote, but nothing else!

[Nadia]

Hi Aiyoku,

Thank you for responding to me!

Yes, the problem becomes keeping track of users in our product and Trello, since the emails may be different. Hence why I need an API solution.

The plan we go for depends on which has the capabilities we need. And I'd be open to integrating with other services, if I can get the functionality I need, but it doesn't look like Trello is the right fit for us!

[Aiyoku]

I'm not sure about whether you can send API requests to have permissions revoked. I know you'd probably have to remove them manually from the board without API. Which plan are you going to be on for Trello: Gold or Business Class? Does your project allow for integration with automation services like Zapier or Integrately?