Keep getting notifications to upgrade to Premium as more than 15 team members cannot be part. I don’t have 15 team members, and I don’t want to upgrade as it is great the way it is. How to I continue?
Are you set up as an organization or workspace and do you have 15 organizational members with the same email domain?
The 15 limits is the sum of the team members and of the limited access members. For instance if you’re in team A, then if in one of your project you invite someone from a team B, this B member will count for 1 in your team A limit.
I think you are in that case, and the counting correction made by Asana is active since this morning.
Here is an extract from an Asana communication:
"Two years ago we made a product change which resulted in us counting users improperly within teams. When we fixed the bug, we realized that many accounts, including yours, have more users than our free team limit of 15. This was our fault and we apologize for the mistake.
This update won’t affect the number of members you currently have in teams. However, starting next week, if you want to add more members (and exceed the 15 member limit), you’ll need to upgrade to Asana Premium."
That is extremely unfortunate. More importantly - it’s misleading and just led to a major vendor lock-in.
What Asana now calls “Limited Access Members” used to be “Guests”.
The capabilities were different. Team Members were clearly indicated in the “team members” bar, outlining the remaining number of members until an upgrade is needed.
Organizations like ours also invite “Guests” in the form of: clients, vendors, freelancers, consultants, contractors, you name it. This means that, after the recent update, we’re obliged to pay for everyone, regardless of their role or access in the community.
This is completely - I repeat - completely different than the initial definition of “Team Members” versus “Guests”. Had that been the case in the first place, we would have taken a different approach. Now we are effectively stuck with over 50 people (after a cleanup, used to be a lot more) to be paid for at $10/user/mo (or over $550/mo in our case).
Asana’s excuse isn’t really a solution to the problem. What they refer to as a “bug” would have been the ability to add more than 15 team members without paying. This hasn’t been the case and they just renamed the “Guest” user to a class of “member” in order to charge for it.
I do understand the business implications of the situation. A month after the latest $75M funding investors are likely looking for additional monetization opportunities. And we do like Asana, still.
But charging for guest users automatically increases our monthly costs by a scale of 10. Moreover, Asana does not provide time tracking in its core (premium version) - and the recommended Harvest is also priced at $12/user/mo.
An effective license plan, in that case, would cost significantly more than many of the market alternatives.
Paying for senior project managers and C-level? Absolutely.
Paying for absolutely everyone (even John Smith’s designer friend chiming in for a task)? Not at all. Even Slack offers a free single-channel guest version.
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@Mario_Peshev Can I respectively query your demographics with you to confirm it is as bad as conveyed.
- Are you an organization or a workspace?
- Are you using a premium account or a free account.
- How many users of Asana have the same email domain or organizational email address.
- Does your account show Teams and Projects versus Projects only?
These would be helpful for the Asana Champions and Asana to understand your possibilities and brainstorm with you.
Thanks
Jim
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A workspace. Please read further.
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A free account. Our CTO has scheduled 3 calls with Asana in 2017 regarding a possible migration to premium. Asana’s representatives didn’t show up. That’s unprofessional on its own, but since we’re using the free version, we haven’t pushed for another upgrade after three trials.
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12 people have been registered with our company email address. Everyone else is using a gmail account or is a vendor, client, partner, freelancer, etc. using their own domain.
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I’d say it’s projects-only since we’re a workspace (if I understand the question correctly).
Regards,
Mario
Hi there, we have the same problem…
I went to work and our Asana doesnt working…
In our Team we have only 9 members, but we cannot do anything because of “Restore Premium to keep all team members”
So we cannot work, thank you, Asana
Can you please explain how it works?
We are in Organization, free account with ± 100 users with the same domain
We cannot access to only 1 team from a lot of others that works well …
Why only one team with 9 members is unaccessible?
@Mario_Peshev I will do my best on this but I would start with this post in reply to my original post When do member seats get used up? - #4 by Nicola
- The first thing I would do is have support, support @asana.com change you to an organization where you begin the process of only your domain seats counting albeit because you have a free account it probably can get more complex.
- The second thing I would look at is the premium plan calculator referenced on Log in - Asana. If you get a premium 15 member seat plan leaving you an extra 3 member seats and pay annually it works out to $93.75 per month and Asana provides a small business discount. That is $6.25 per member seat per month, a very competitive price. You of course would not be close to the $550 per month and have a great feature set addition.
- Limited guest status does use up seats but only in workspaces not organizations (there is not a concept of limited guests in an organization)
- Organizations have unlimited guests, ie (guests without your domain address) so you should be in great shape.
- I am not an Asana employee so this should be verified by Asana, maybe a customer success person. I could not see Nicola who answered the orginal thread. @Alexis could you get a customer success person to confirm this versus pointing to the guide due to the confusion and @Julien_RENAUD feel free to jump in as I don’t think this is as big a problem as appears. The one item I need to pin down is how non-domain users use up seats in free organizations. I am quite confident in the premium organization response but could be wrong.
I am also not totally convinced you cannot run the free version once you convert to an organization under your domain.
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@Pavel_Budin Your situation is quite different from @Mario_Peshev. It is my understanding that any domain name used throughout an organization for any purpose uses a member seat. I am not sure how it could really be any different and Asana make a profit. There has been information on the blog before with the connotation that you can have unlimited domain users as long as there was not more than 15 in any one team. I do not believe that this is accurate. I think organization member count on free memberships is quite simple and is going to count any use by a domain user. The concept of limited guests is a Workspace concept and once again simply limits the number of users from all email domains to 15 as I understand. Again this is how I understand and @alexis can pull in a customer success person just like what happened on my original post Log in - Asana and @Julien_RENAUD can jump in also.
I have confirmed that in a free organization all domain (or not )use one of the 15 free seats. In a Premium organization only domain emails count, all else do not. This is a great feature for networking to many guests whether be clients, volunteers or any party with a vested interest. The guests also have robust capabilities. I know for a fact that another competitor most often mentioned here gives their guests very limited capabilities. Hope this helps.
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Ok, thank you! I created new Team with similar projects and its now limited to 15 members…
Can you explain me how it is possible, that every other Teams in our Organization still worked?
We have Teams with 80 members, which was created maybe 2 years ago and it still work with full access to all 150 members in our Organization… Why only one Team have a notification about Restore a Premium Plan??
We never had a Premium plan 
@Pavel_Budin I think @Michael_A would have to answer your question on this one.
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Thanks for the flag @James_Carl; you’ve been pretty spot on re: all the points above!
Hey @Pavel_Budin!
For a case by case breakdown of what you’re experiencing, I highly suggest you reach out to Asana Support - Help Center • Asana. Our user operations team will have access to the kind of details of your account that no one here will be able to view. Without this info, it’s difficult to be able to reach an ultimate source of truth for your particular case.
We’ll be waiting for you on the other side! 
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Hi, thank you, i sent email to support, but nobody replied… We sent to the same adress other mails last week and there is no answer from Asana 
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Hi @Pavel_Budin! Just dropped you a DM to follow-up on this, have a look at your Inbox!
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Thank you, this was helpful. My colleague has initiated yet another thread with Asana directly, trying to schedule a migration, making sure that switching from workspace to an organization won’t cause any data loss (users, access, tasks, whatever).
Fingers crossed, happy to transition if that’s indeed the case. Thanks again.
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Let us know how you come out. I think it would be educational for the community.
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Thanks James.
After a lot of back and forth, we were converted to an organization last week. I ended up paying $2,400 for a year, or about $200 per month (with the discount for an annual purchase) despite having 12 folks with a DevriX email.
One of the unpleasant surprises leading to the extra charge were former freelancers and former employees who signed up with a company email address a long time ago. While they haven’t been using Asana since they quit, their accounts were automatically accounted as team members.
That cost us over $700 for the year and I hope that we can sort it for next year’s renewal - but it’s definitely far from ideal.
Asana tried to suggest a workspace model two or three times. It made zero sense paying for 50 members (having clients, vendors, contractors) so I don’t know why they even tried. Organization seems to be an okay option so far.
Just sharing for everyone else interested (plus the extra surprises we encountered on the way).
Appreciate the suggestion, it was helpful for sure.