Trello is $5/user/mo (Standard). Prairie is a self-hosted alternative at $0.99/mo. Here's when each makes sense.
| Prairie | Trello | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Self-hosted, your infra | Managed SaaS (cloud only) |
| Data location | Your server, your disk | Trello's cloud |
| Free tier | 3 boards | Paid only |
| Pro pricing | $0.99/mo | $5/user/mo (Standard) |
| Dependencies | None (single binary + SQLite) | N/A (managed) |
| Setup time | ~30 seconds | Account signup |
| Dashboard | Built-in at /ui | Cloud dashboard |
| License | BSL 1.1 | Proprietary SaaS |
Prairie is a single Go binary with embedded SQLite. Install it with one command, and you are running in under a minute. Your data stays on your server.
curl -fsSL https://stockyard.dev/prairie/install.sh | sh
The pricing math between Prairie and Trello changes depending on team size. Trello at $5/user/mo (Standard) is reasonable for a solo user. At ten seats, the difference compounds. Prairie is a flat $0.99/mo regardless of seats — the binary does not count how many people use it. For growing teams, this makes Prairie progressively cheaper while Trello gets progressively more expensive.
Architecturally, Prairie and Trello could not be more different. Trello runs on distributed cloud infrastructure with load balancers, managed databases, CDNs, and redundancy across availability zones. Prairie is a single process writing to a single file on a single disk. That sounds fragile until you realize that SQLite handles more concurrent readers than most web applications will ever need, and WAL mode means reads never block writes.
Moving from Trello does not have to be all-or-nothing. Some teams run Prairie for new data while keeping Trello as a read-only archive of historical records. The API makes it straightforward to build a sync script if you need both systems to reflect the same data during a transition period.
Single binary. Free to start. $0.99/mo for Pro.