Introducing Portfolios: The mission control center for everything you need to track in your business

Following up with support gets a 25% discount to Asana Business for 1 year. Unfortunately if it is not a bigger discount, lifetime upgrade, or the ability to upgrade 1 user, then Asana for Business is simply not in the cards. From support conversations it seems like that’s the case , and the state of this thread and others shows that its more the goal of making these small/medium sized businesses “fade away” rather than help grandparent them into the new tools.

I suggest people here look into 3rd party reporting options that can fill that gap in their workflow, or look for alternatives that offer the same functionality at much less of the cost… others here have linked Asana2Go and other tools. Best of luck!

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Hi @Evan_Pappas ,

I’m glad to hear you were able to get in contact with our support team and I’m sorry you’re still frustrated with the price of Asana Business.

In certain instances our sales and support teams are able to offer discounts for users on a case by case basis to help make the transition to Business easier for teams; however we do not have any widely available discounts for Asana. If you are interested in learning more about Asana or have any questions, please reach out to sales@asana.com.

The SaaS business model should be the following: you pay a monthly fee, you don’t own your data, BUT the provider guarantees you trust and continuous improvements to the product. That’s where you money should go: you pay a virtually unlimited amount of money to have periodical new features and fixes.
Asana is doing the opposite.

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I’m kinda surprised @KellyB is (one of?) the only one(s) mentioning all of us many unhappy users over in the Why-The-Heck-Are-Projects-Suddenly-With-No-Explanations-Or-Warning-Showing-Up-Below-Variable-Length-Description-Field thread.

While I didn’t ever really use Dashboards much, so wasn’t personally bothered by the idea of them disappearing, I’ve been following this thread with disappointment. The gloss-over/upsell approach Asana is taking makes me glad I hadn’t yet shelled out for upgrading my personal free account I have for non-work related projects (like tracking a side gig and planning a family reunion). To give you a perspective on that and how much I valued the product, I’d been seriously considering personally paying for 5 users seats (the minimum size for the paid plans), just so I’d have my own personal access to Asana and still have custom fields.

My paid work for a company of about 40 users (most of us with paid Asana seats) has been going in the direction of leaving Asana for JIRA, ever since my newish boss was hired who is much more familiar with JIRA. I’d been dreading this change in a way, since traditionally I’ve been a major Asana enthusiast, since starting to use it almost 2 years ago.

But seeing the way Asana dealt (or rather chose NOT to deal) with the mistaken UI direction they took (as detailed in the above-linked thread), and now how they are treating their once-loyal-and-enthusiast users, I’m starting to look forward to the moment we can extricate ourselves from a company that I don’t feel loyal to or excited about anymore.

  1. I’m seeing the trend shaping up where the most vocal users (who surely should represent even more users who aren’t taking the time to speak up) are essentially being ignored about the important core issues we are trying to have a dialogue around. In my opinion, upselling is not the same as a discussion about loss of trust.

  2. I’m seeing a lack of proactive, clear communication coming from Asana about major changes. They did slightly better on communication this time around, since at least I heard Dashboards were being deprecated, but as KellyB noted, we weren’t told ahead of time that we should expect a price increase for the replacement feature.

  3. I’m seeing a lack of ability on Asana’s part to recognize when they have made a mistake, and take actual steps to address and fix the mistake. As so many have mentioned here, if Asana needs the price increase to cover the costs of the Portfolio feature development and more, then grandfather the existing users in, so they remain the loyal fan base they once were, and continue all the word-of-mouth recommendations we all used to give, and all those new users taking our word for how great Asana once was could have come in on the higher pricing tiers without feeling frustrated by a bait and switch.

I’ve worked customer support before, and I get it that the Asana support team has to tow the line and offer the limited-time, expires-in-a-year discount to only the most pushy and/or in-a-bind customers. But I also know the pain of seeing that the company I worked for at the time was in the wrong, and the customers were in the right, and that I wasn’t allowed or empowered to help fix it for the customers.

In my experience of customer support:

  • 1 user saying something is an issue is (cynically) likely because they don’t know what they are doing.
  • 2 users saying it’s an issue might still be due to user error.
  • 3 users all saying the same thing is an issue for them is no longer due to user error, but at least due to something that could (and IMO should) be fixed, even if it’s a small UI adjustment to make the proper workflow more clear, etc.
  • 130 + users all saying it’s an issue (or in the case of the of the other thread I mentioned, ~200 users) means that the company has definitely made some sort of mistake, should acknowledge the mistake, and make the effort to actually make amends.

Amends can look like a lot of things, and in the two cases I’ve mentioned here, Asana has many opportunities for lots of different ways they could choose to apologize and make amends. I don’t see them doing that however.

It’s really too bad, as this is the kind of thing that can make a company stronger, both by strengthening the trust and support of the user base, and also by showing your staff internally that it’s a good company to work for. When one has a good work ethic and cares personally about providing good value to one’s customers, it’s painful to see that the company you work for isn’t doing right by the customers.

I assume most of the people who work for Asana could read this thread and the other, and would fall into that camp. To all of you, thanks for caring about us, and I feel for you.

I assume that it’s the Asana leadership which is putting assumed/real fiscal profit above all else, and I’d argue that a lot of companies do that, anyway, so that’s not the issue (at least not in this thread). The issue is that effective companies that are good at what they do make a profit while also making the user feel as though the profit is not the only thing that matters, and that our needs and concerns are what the company is there to help us solve. And Asana is not making me feel that way anymore, and hasn’t been for awhile.

As such, Asana isn’t being very effective anymore, at least in terms of user perception. And I don’t want my data with an ineffective company, nor do I want other people I know associating me with having recommended an ineffective company. I won’t recommend Asana anymore, which is a sad turn of events. Sounds like a lot of us are saddened that what we thought was a good company is turning out to not be something we can recommend anymore.

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I want to point out that the problem in my opinion is not only that they removed the dashboard. Actually, I’ve never used it.
It’s a matter of principle. Asana is a good product, but it’s FAR from being complete. I accepted to become a paying user with my 10 seats and recommended it to many more people because I were confident that Asana would have worked for premium (yes PREMIUM) users to add the functionality we really missed. We trust the company, we pay, and we support the development. Doesn’t sound logic?
And now we see that the steps taken in the good direction, of being a more complete product, are done for an additional (doubled!) price.
This is unjustifiable for me.
Dear support: I’m not willing to accept your 2 months free trial because I’m shouting loud. This is offensive, expecially if you consider that your CEO is travelling the world speaking about company morality (and how to make the world a “better place”, like a character of Silicon Valley TV show).

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100% agree. I have been recommending this product to clients and the dashboard was one of the better features. Would like to know if asana even considered grandfathering existing users or giving them access to the new ‘portfolio’ feature - taking away functionality without giving something similar or better is absolutely ridiculous.

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3 weeks later and this thread is still filling up with disappointed users. Both existing and new. I’m quite dumbfounded that the response still appears to be “contact sales to discuss your options” when everyone knows what that means.

Not good enough Asana. I’ve already started evaluating other products.

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Excellent, Adam, thank you. I have also advocated for Asana for years and at least three Companies in my hometown are using it as of today. After this debacle and an unbearable cost raise, Clickup seems to be a wonderful option, and it even features the scheduling option for the employees workload (still no ETA by Asana) and native time tracking, which Asana only offers through expensive third party integrations. Thanks for the tip, I’ll be trying it tomorrow.

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Pay attention mates, Asana moderation team is going to delete your posts if you name competitors. I suggest to stay more general.
I’m also studying the market from a couple of weeks now, and after this awful experience with Asana I don’t want to trust anymore any SaaS company. I’m looking for self hosted solutions with one time payment. I don’t want anymore to be hostage of a company that does own my data and has the power to change the game when they like.

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Yes, at least we should have the feature until our 12 months runs out, then I can see the new tier, or lock the current customs with the upgrade. Either way my love for Asana just died as a small nonprofit.

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Well this is dissapointing. I recently came back to Asana after not being happy with the way Basecamp dealt with a few issues. But seeing that pricing is doubled for a feature that was always there before…not cool.

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100% agree Alex,

I was on the phone to an Asana Specialist last week and went through this whole scenario of re-packaging dashboards just to up-sell to higher paying clients. I said that we would not be upgrading our entire organisation to the business plan while there are still basic requests that get ignored and fundamental project management options that we as premium members pay for that don’t work. The specific example I used was the “templates” and the “dependent tasks” (something we pay for as premium users) which both don’t work even according to the pure definition of their names.

I really think Asana needs to listen more to the requests and feedback of their paid users, the people using the tool day to day otherwise it will just become another tool that is just “ok”. @TimTieu

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Exactly agree with Brad. The problem is not the retirement of a function, but the fact that Asana lacks many many basic features. And instead of invest on those, the development team is occupied creating new more expensive tiers. What is the new features request forum useful for? We write, suggest, request, ask, discuss… Ignored and weighted as pockets. It’s the whole Asana vision that is in the wrong direction. It’s such a dumb twist that I barely can believe…

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Hi @Brad_Heydon and all,

I truly appreciate your feedback, and while I don’t reply to every single post, I can ensure you that I have read them all and regularly report to our Product Team. I think I have already referenced this info earlier in this thread, but if you haven’t already, have a look at this post which outlines how we process feedback and use them to build our roadmap.

Our product team is full of experts who have a tremendous vision for the future of Asana and who spend a lot of their time reading/listening to Asana’s customer requests and considering how those requests fit into our greater business strategy and product vision. With hundreds of feedback coming our way on a daily basis, we have to make choices and unfortunately don’t always have the resources to build things as fast as our customers would like. We heavily rely on your feedback to make decisions; in fact, the vast majority of the new features we have launched over the years are directly resulting from your feedback.

I’m currently working on restructuring this Forum, and one of my top priority will be to improve the #productfeedback category to make it as useful and transparent as possible (feel free to drop me a DM if you have any ideas you’d like to see implemented in this category). I’m hoping to have more info on the restructure early 2019 and will make sure to all loop you in!

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There is nothing I could say that wasn’t said before by hundreds of users above (let’s not mention these who just gave up, tired and defeated…)

Still - I will say it.

Asana - your decision to remove one (really useful) feature and replace is with another, very similar (but “pay us more”) feature is a bad one. I say that as an apostle of your solution.

It’s not only making your users unhappy - but worse - it shows you as a greedy.

Greed is not pretty Asana.

Just sayin’.

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@Marie as much as I, and I’m sure others appreciate your reply, it is still the typical, generic response we have come to expect from asana. As multiple people have mentioned in this post, the response is generally “contact sales to get a trial” or “ read this post to see how we do things” yet the basic things don’t get fixed. I think most of the users would prefer the basics done right and actually work. Instead the time is being spent on innovation of new ideas that only partially work. The irritating thing is, we as the user have to pay during the process of figuring out the ideas.
I got told on the phone the other to “upgrade to the business plan now as there are cool ideas coming in the future”. So pay a huge amount extra now for something that hasn’t happened yet.

Would just be great if the suggestions and comments of the very basic things felt like they were actually getting attention.

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Indeed we also were very happy with the introduction of Portfolio as it will allow us to stop the trick of having a management project to list all other projects and facilitate the status publication but the introduction of a new subscription plan is clearly unfair. Also the price is just insane and the feel to be locking is not a good message. I think competition is really tuff in this space and even big players are starting to be there too with more service for lower money. So yes we are ready to support Asana as Premium and invest in good relation to support our business but to abuse and become the next SF as we can shift quickly …

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Funding = cheating = bad decisions

Listen, I dont actually care about this at all. I always thought dashboard was terrible and had no use for it what so ever. I don’t care that they trashed it and created a new, better thing and charged more for it. That actually makes sense to some degree.

Having said that, it’s clear that they did NOT have their clients/customers in mind when they made these decisions. When you accept millions of dollars from someone else you become their slave. You now have to make decisions based on “how will we pay these people back” instead of “how will we best serve our customer”.

This right here is why you don’t go into massive debt.

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I’m a long time Asana user. Many years ago, I’ve reported bugs, pointed to improvements that needed to be done. I were listened. And in few weeks they fixed the bugs and improved the product based on my contribute. Now, despite what you say, it’s not. It not a matter of making the forum better (by the way, are many many months, maybe one year, that the forum is with “improvements soon” without any change… and you are still asking for ideas?). It’s a matter of read, collect, put in a roadmap and DO.

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Still no update beyond a 1 year discount and not being able to upgrade 1 user. The issue is less about anything being done immediately, I want to at least know if a solution is being prepared on the horizon. As of right now they are implying nothing will be done about this, as eventually the thrashing small businesses will eventually upgrade or leave the platform. They locked down their big fish that don’t really mind upgrading, and if this thread is any inclination, they are happy with that.

I’m not from their team, but Asana2Go can be a great fill-in for reporting if you need, their team has been great helping us set up some reports. If anyone has ideas or options to cope with this please post! 3rd party tools or alternative platforms, as others have mentioned. Have a great day and best of luck to everyone trying to keep their workflow moving smoothly!

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