Trello costs $5/user/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $180 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$5/user/month (Standard) is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Boardly: the pay-once alternative
Boardly does the same core job for $19, once. Self-hosted kanban — drag & drop boards, checklists, labels, attachments, full JSON export.
| Boardly | Trello | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 once | $5/user/month (Standard) |
| 10-person team, 3 years | $19 total | $1,800 |
| Boards | Unlimited | Limited on free tier |
| Attachments | Your disk, your limits | 250 MB/file cap, plan-gated |
| Data ownership | SQLite file on your box | Atlassian's cloud |
| Works offline / air-gapped | Yes | No |
| Full JSON export | One click, attachments included | Plan-gated |
| Telemetry | None | Plenty |
Boardly costs less than four months of a single Trello seat — for a team it pays for itself the day you install it.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Trello's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Boardly is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Boardly — $19, once
Self-hosted kanban — drag & drop boards, checklists, labels, attachments, full JSON export.