I am really frustrated with how the trial expiration is handled here. Last week, my friend and I signed up for the free version of Asana to start tracking a new project. When we created the account Asana automatically started us on an “Advanced” free trial without us explicitly asking for it.
Our trial expired yesterday and I expected the account to just drop down to the permanent free tier maybe hiding whatever advanced features we tried out. Instead, our entire board has been completely locked down. Apparently we used a custom field during the trial and now Asana is holding a week’s worth of our hard work hostage behind a paywall. We can’t even access the project to delete the custom field and get back to work.
Also, there is literally no way to contact a human support agent. The help section just forces you into an endless loop with an AI chatbot that doesn’t have an actual answer for how to unlock a project without paying.
After searching around this forum I can see we aren’t the first ones to deal with this. Several users have been posting about this exact same issue over the years yet Asana continues to use this practice. It’s really disappointing to see that years of user feedback on this topic have been completely ignored.
We finally had to move to a competitor who literally in a few seconds pull all our data from Asana. So what ever reason you decided to paywall your free product has not worked. This on-boarding experience completely missed the mark. Locking people out of their data and hiding behind a broken chatbot just pushes users away.
I really hope someone from the product team actually reads this and changes how the trial rollback works.
I’m sorry, @flgoo; I sympathize with you and have lobbied Asana to change this.
For others reading, to temporarily restore access to locked projects so that you can remove the advanced features, Contact our Sales Team • Asana and they will accomplish that.
Thanks Larry, and I appreciate that you’ve been lobbying Asana to change this.
I had seen similar message on other posts as well directing locked-out users to a corporate sales contact form, but I was not comfortable with providing all my data to a sales team.
My point is why should a basic product support issue caused by an automatic trial we didn’t even ask for require anyone to go through a sales funnel? To even submit that contact form, Asana forces you to hand over an active phone number, business email, and company size. The fine print at the bottom explicitly states that by submitting it, you are automatically opted into marketing promotions.
It gets worse if you actually read Asana’s official Privacy Statement. They openly admit that information collected from these web forms is shared with third-party advertising partners.
Turning a software lockout into a corporate lead-generation funnel is an incredibly shady way to handle customer support. I hope the product team eventually listens, because right now, this onboarding design is just handing customers directly to their competitors.
@Forum-team, this seems to have gotten worse since our discussions a while ago with the product team. Would it be possible to have Support instead of Sales address these issues for the reasons @flgoo mentions?
Hi @lpb and @flgoo, thank you for taking the time to share this feedback. I wanted to let you know that we’ve submitted your feedback internally so our product team can review it and consider it for future improvements. We appreciate you taking the time to share your experience and insights with us.