Understanding the Asana pricing

I have some questions around the interactions between premium and free teams within a free organisation.

  1. Can tasks be added to several projects that span both premium and free teams?
  2. If so, then say someone is working with a task that is in multiple projects across both premium and free teams, but they are only a member of one of the free teams. Can they still work with the task as usual (assign and work on it within the free team)?
  3. If so, does the person who was assigned the task in the free team get added to the seats of the premium team and so generate extra charges?
  4. If the person does not take up a seat in the premium team, how do the premium features work for the premium team who have that same task in their project? Would the user in the premium team be able to set a start date on the task and then see that start date in the project in the premium team? Whereas, the staff member in the free team would see the task but not see the premium features?

An example of this situation:

A software company has several teams: a management team, several development teams and some other teams that aren’t relevant to this example. The management team is premium whereas each development team is free.

The management team is looking at whether to start a new building a new feature. They are planning out this investigation using their premium features, including using custom fields and making a timeline using start dates. One of the tasks is to investigate a particular technological choice which will be looked at by one of the development teams. So, this task is added to the development team’s “Upcoming Work” project in the “Next Week” section. The development team’s then members assign the task internally and work on it etc etc…

How do the above questions apply to this situation?

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Those are great questions. As soon as we have answers from @moderators I’ll update the post!

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I actually disagree that it is clear and think Amanda’s point still stands. I thought the same thing as Amanda and think it is understandable to do so when they have a minimum number of “seats”/users for the plan. I get that once you click on it and read more that you can see the the monthly cost is actually not the advertised cost. But I think they could be even more transparent in what they offer and their pricing. Also the terms “seats” is totally bizarre to me. Took me a bit to realize they charge by the user.

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1000000% this… it appears to be an underhanded attempt to force more profit out of smaller teams. Instead of give you the size you actually need. Asana forces you to over allocate for no other reason than to squeeze more profit. This way, they can show you lower per user pricing in order to on paper appear cheaper than competitors. The reason they are continually dodging the question is that there is absolutely no other reason or rationale for it. Sad to see such a great product plagued with such silly policies for squeezing small businesses.

I have just joined Asana under a premium plan for the minimum of two seats but as a sole practitioner but I only need one. Unfortunately, I cannot sustain the cost for 2 seats indefinitely. I notice many people have written on this topic, or to say they need 6 seats but cannot afford to pay for 10 etc. The replies from you / the team say ‘we recognise this and will look at it’ but as far as I can see nothing has been done about it. To me, it feels like bad business, poor customer service and even slightly underhand. Can you update on this? Thank you

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Hi @Rupert_Scott and thanks for sharing your feedback with us. We’ve recently implemented paid plans for smaller teams to help smaller teams work with Asana premium and Business; but as it stands we’re not planning to introduce a solo user plan. I’ll make sure to update this thread as well as Please make a Premium Solo Plan - #452 if this was to change in the future!

It’s a shame because I will probably cancel my membership now, rather than continuing with what I had understood, whilst setting things up, to be £9.95 per month. I like the platform, and may well have needed more seats in the future, but there is something off about advertising a price that it is not possible to access.

Hello,

I have a simple question.: Can I use the free Asana ?
Today the 30 days trial ended, and the platform show me all time the “Compate plans” message, but I dont wanna upgrade yet. How can I turn off this popup message?

Thank you so much!

HI @Hajdu_Lajos, I’d recommend following these steps to make sure your plan is set to cancel as your trial ends. Once you do this, you will automatically be switched back to the free version of Asana. If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to reach out to our support team who will be able to take a look into your account. Hope this helps :slight_smile:

Hmmm, itt will be soo nice, but I dont have “billing” menupoint in admin site. What can I do?
This is my admin site: Screenshot by Lightshot

Please inform me how can I solve this problem!?

Having some background in programming, I completely see why changing the scope of Asana to an individual format would take a vast amount of code changes. Everything in Asana, meaning the tasks, fields within the tasks, projects and teams are all meant to “tie back” to assignability and ownership (at least one other person). Removing all of those cross-referenced ties would defeat the purpose of Asana. I use Asana all by myself, I just don’t need the assignment fields. I do however use the Teams to create “Departments”, thus keeping projects in like-minded lists.

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Having a solo plan also means having millions of new paid users that would expect a high availability of the support team to help them…

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Post has been improved with two questions-answers from @LEGGO about divisions.

Can you have Business and Premium users within the same organization?
Are there limitations to having Divisions within the same corporate domain?

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@Emily_Roman can you confirm in a Division all Teams must be on a paid plan, and you can’t have a free team?

@Bastien_Siebman you can have Teams on a free plan within a domain in which there also exists a paid plan. Only the Teams associated with the paid plan will have access to the features of the paid plan.

True but does that work when you work in a Division? For example at your company do you have free teams?

Sorry. I wasn’t explicit. Yes, I was speaking about my actual experience. There are many free teams that exist on our domain that are not part of my division license. The division just being a collection of hand-picked teams to include within the license. All unique members across the teams in the division take up a license seat. If you have members that are part of teams that are in the division but also those that are on a free plan, they only have access to the features available within that specific team.

Does that answer your question?

Teams in a division are ALL on the paid plan associated with the division. None can be free. HOWEVER there is nothing stopping a single, group or all members that are associated with the division to be part of a free team that isn’t mapped to the division. The division is simply a means to license a sub-group within an organization but puts no restrictions on where free teams can exist.

Now… if you are asking if a team within a division can be downgraded to FREE (thus remove access to any paid features) but not have the limitation of only 15 members that comes with a free plan… no, that isn’t possible.

That was the missing piece, thanks.

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I would spend more time reading on posts about how to use asana so I can use it to make money, than learning how to avoid paying for additional seat I don’t need at this moment but I will very soon.

Still VERY confusing for a new user on a free plan with 4 members (including myself), even after reading it all and reading the attached links and articles.

QUESTION 1:
Organization Membership is defined by the company email domain. All others will join your Organization as Guests.

I opened my account under my domain and my email is my domain’s email, so I assume I am an organization. In contrary to what it says above, my 4 members are listed as members (not guests) even though they have nothing to do with my domain and each one uses their personal email (Gmail, Yahoo, etc) so can you explain why they are called members and not guests?

QUESTION 2:
As I’m growing the company, time after time I consider purchasing the premium plan but don’t because I still can’t figure out what “per seat” means. I am willing to pay $10.99 per month but definitely not $43.96 (if “per seat” means the monthly price times the number of members)

So my question is if I only pay $10.99 and say I then add custom fields (not available in the free version), does this mean that the other three members will not be able to see these custom fields?

And if so, would that be the case if they were guests or members? And if so, can I convert a guest to a member and visa versa so they have access to custom fields even if I’m only paying $10.99? Bottom line, is there a way to pay only $10.99 and have the entire team be able to continue working on tasks as they are now, and also benefit from premium features that I add such as custom fields?

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