@Charles_Newman, so long as you’re not on an Enterprise plan, I believe this should be possible. You don’t mention the plan you’re on or what’s happening when you try, but I think your best bet is:
Please create a support ticket: see How to contact our Support Team. They will be able to see your account and help you.
Thanks,
Larry
100% agree - clear revenue tactic leaving customers almost always paying for extra seats and feeling ripped off. I don’t need “flexibility for growth”, I need value and transparent/fair pricing.
I need 11 seats. Asana is forcing me to pay for 15. There is no product or technical justification for this.
I run a small business. When we grew past 5 employees, I faced this same problem — forced to jump to 10 seats when I only needed 6. Rather than pay for empty seats, I had employees use personal email addresses as guests. It was a terrible experience: limited features, constant confusion, and a workaround that should never have been necessary.
Now at 10 users, I need to add one person. Asana’s answer? Jump to 15 seats at $457.35/month. So I’m back to the same hack — new team members on personal guest accounts because I refuse to pay for 4 seats that will sit empty.
I want to be direct: this policy is not just bad for customers, it’s bad for Asana.
I’m actively involved in communities of small business owners. Multiple founders I know have chosen not to use Asana specifically because of this pricing structure. They see rigid seat tiers as a signal that Asana doesn’t understand small businesses. These are customers Asana is losing before they ever sign up — some of whom would grow into large accounts.
Notion, Slack, Claude, Figma, Google Workspace — every major SaaS tool I use lets me buy exactly the seats I need. Asana is the outlier, and not in a good way.
I’m happy to pay for 11 seats. I’m not happy to pay for 15. And judging by years of forum threads saying the same thing, I’m far from alone.
I agree with you. But I recall a while ago someone (@Bastien_Siebman?) compared Asana with its closest competitors (not those you listed) and they also price in bands/tiers. That doesn’t make it right, but I wanted to surface that, at least.
I’ve merged your post into an existing topic where you can click the title to scroll to the top and vote at the top-left.
Thanks,
Larry
My study is a bit old but indeed back then, the “bundle seat” based tier was not uncommon. It doesn’t make it ok but at least that’s not completely unheard of.
My organization recently hired our 31st Asana-using team member, which meant increasing our seat count from 30 to 40 because Asana sells seats in groups of 10 when there are more than 30 users. This is a significant burden on small organizations, especially when the most of the seats will be unused. The 31st seat essentially costs 10 times what the first 30 did. Even continuing to sell seats in blocks of 5 for organizations up to 50 people would lower the burden significantly.
I sympathize.
Would it be ok to consolidate your request with this one (let me know by reply here):
Either way, Don’t forget to click the title to scroll to the top and vote by clicking the Vote button at the top-left; that’s the quickest and most effective way to express your support for a request.
Thanks,
Larry
Hi Larry, yes consolidating the threads is fine with me. Thank you!
Consolidated 
What am I supposed to do with the seats I’m forced to buy that I don’t need? Pretty shady and unethical from Asana. For a small business where every dollar counts, the logical answer is to find Asana alternatives. In the end, instead of being “clever” and showing higher ARR, you’ll just lose all the revenue from the seats I do need. Unbelievable that for years Asana keeps getting away with this…
Asana Ambassador here (read: big fan, longtime user, have migrated my team to Asana). I’m adding a 6th seat to our team’s subscription and am immensely frustrated that our subscription cost is now doubling because of the forced jump from 5 to 10 seats. I can’t imagine any other reason for this than a prioritization of cash cow enterprise accounts over against small teams and small businesses. My charitable take is “that’s just economies of scale/business, baby;” my less charitable take is that it’s also spelled G-R-E-E-D.
Pair this with 1) a seemingly impossible flow/process to apply our nonprofit discount code to our existing subscription, which I haven’t been able to successfully do yet, and 2) Asana’s support routing to a less-than-helpful chatbot, and evidently it just sucks to be a small nonprofit using Asana. Kind of feels like corporate bullying! And makes me wonder if I’ve been wrong to be singing Asana’s praises to colleagues and others in recent years…
Related, forcing a minimum of 2 seats on any plan makes using Asana for my personal life as a single adult on a 1-person team of me cost twice as much as it needs to, with no possibility for adjustment. There’s simply no reason this should be the case. Requiring a minimum of 2 users “because Asana’s designed for teamwork” is a cute tagline—but impractical, unnecessary, and an excuse to be greedy.
Emily,
Wanted to follow up two years after your message and see if this is an ability/feature the Asana team would consider launching in the future based on the feedback from many users expressed in this thread. I was told by an account executive that the finance team is firm on tiered seat scaling/minimum seat requirements and additions—which tells me this is a financial decision by Asana rather than a product decision. That makes the several accusations and suspicions of greed in this thread seem to be a bit more substantiated…but I’d love to not arrive at that conclusion prematurely.
Will Asana consider changing this? And what’s the explicit reason it’s prohibited?