Remove Upgrade button & Orange banner

See my post below for a quick and easy and working fix on your issue. :slight_smile:

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Really, Asana? What the hell is this? Shoo shoo fellow users?

I have a team of 15 on a paid Premium plan. Actually it’s a team of 11, but the tiered pricing structure forces me to pay for 4 empty seats. But that’s a separate gripe.

WE DID UPGRADE from free to Premium and we’re paying $1,800 (not an insignificant amount of money) a year for the features my team needs.

Yet, each one of my team members has to stare an obnoxious button that greedily prompts them to upgrade yet again. This communicates the message that their employer is cheap and conducting business on an unsuitable software version (i.e. free or trial).

We spent many months researching and testing Asana and its many close competitors, eventually chosing Asana because of the timeline feature.

The upgrade button makes me doubt our decision every time I see it (about 50 times a day).

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My company has 40 seats on the Premium Plan. Why are we being nagged to death to upgrade to the Business Plan when we dont need it? Are customers on the Business Plan nagged to upgrade to the Enterprise Plan?

I would probably be less angry and frustrated about seeing this eye sore every single NotSoRandomAdjective day if the rational for displaying the upgrade button for paying customers was made public.

If you really want to subject paying customers to the upgrade button, you really need to consider scaling down your service plans from 3 paid plans to 1 paid plan.

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Would it be possible to hide the Upgrade button top right, and the Portfolios button top left?

We’re pretty sure we won’t be using the next tier (our business isn’t ready to commit to the necessary habits to make it worth doing) and given that we already pay for Premium for 50 people, I feel it should be OK for us to not have to look at these up-sell UI elements anymore.

Please?

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While your reworking that area, maybe you can get rid of that annoying [Upgrade] button. I’m already a paying subscriber and don’t need a visually jarring button staring me in the face all day. Not to mention the valuable screen real estate that it consumes.

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Me, too. I know you are trying to upsell, but we are already paying for it. Please, remove this button (or show it one day per month or something)

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Please remove the upgrade button. I constantly have employees asking whether we are out of date or lost our plan and need to upgrade again. I have to explain to them that although we are paying subscribers, Asana still likes to nag you about a different tier (which we are not interested in at this time).

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Please get rid of this. If Sales won an argument with Engineering, the wrong side won. I am positive I’d be able to figure out how to upgrade if and when I decide to without the button being there every day for a week. It’s really distracting. It made me very sorry that I clicked on an upgrade page to check out the pricing.

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Agreed, these changes are terrible. Just sent the below to support:

"Just wanted to formally say that we’ve been really happy using Asana on the premium plan over the last few years, but some of the recent UI/UX changes have been really disappointing.

I little while back a big purple “Upgrade” button appeared in the top-right of the interface. We don’t want or need to upgrade, but have this staring at us every day with no ability to remove it. Then more recently “Portfolios” has appeared in the left-hand nav, again not something we need or want, but it’s now permanently in our navigation menu.

Forcing loyal paying customers to have to actively avoid an increasing number of additional paid upgrade options that are now cluttering the product interface is both an insane product decision, and a disappointing company decision.

Might be worth feeding this back, we’re now actively looking to move."

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I don’t mind top-banner updates. I don’t mind email updates. But taking up valuable space in my project management system for buttons and screens that I don’t have access to? Come on Asana, you know better than this…

If I was a free user, I would get it. I would expect to be upsold. But I’m NOT. I’m a premium user. I expect a premium experience. I ALREADY paid for the Asana features that I want. Show me banners (that disappear…) and email me about new features all you want, I’m happy to learn about them and cheer for Asana’s improvements.

But don’t take up permanent valuable real estate in MY Asana project management tool. BaseCamp doesn’t do that, AirTable doesn’t do that, and many others. Once I start paying for Asana, I expect to see what I pay for, not things that I don’t pay for pushing down access to the projects and features that I access and use every day.

Come on Asana, what’s happened to you? You never would have done this a few years ago.

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This is a really good point. I assumed that my team was on the free plan because I was seeing this upsell. Come to find out that we’re on the premium plan as well and still being sold into features that we’re not “allowed” to have in spite of the fact that we’re paying users.

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Is there a way to remove the “Forms” from a project’s navigation bar, or at least rearrange the nav bar so that it’s in “More…” and we can have “Files” or “Conversations” back in the main nav? It’s really frustrating having a Business feature that requires upgrading in a prime retail space for navigation, especially when our finance department won’t allow us to upgrade.

In addition, the newly added “Portfolios” feature in the sidebar presents a similar problem. I love most of Asana, so am crossing my fingers that this isn’t a permanent marketing strategy that is ultimately an inconvenience for already-paying users and may push our company to another project management platform…

TIA for any input!

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Hi @J-Niv and thanks for writing in!

As it stands, there is no option to remove the Form tab from Project or the Portfolio tab within you sidebar. Other people have shared the same feedback, and while I can’t promise these options will be removed, our team will definitely consider it for future updates. In the meantime, i’ve gone ahead and merged your post with the existing thread we have on this topic to gather all feedback in one place. If you haven’t done so already, I would encourage you to click on the “Vote” button at the top left corner of this thread!

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When you think of how often you access project features like Conversation and Files during the day, multiplied by how many team members there are in your organization, the inconvenience really adds up! These tactics are meant to be obstructive to the point that people give in and upgrade our of frustration. It’s a dark pattern, and is eroding my confidence in Asana’s path forward.

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Our small team upgraded and is currently subscribed as premium as we have determined those are the only features we need right now. The interface currently has two buttons, portfolios and upgrade, that are permanently plastered on the interface. When clicked they both link to screens trying to get us to upsell us to business plans which are double the price of what we actually need. Here is a screenshot for reference:

I find it really tacky that these are essentially permanent in house ads for users who are already paying a decent amount of money. I get it for free users, but we’ve already selected the plan that fits us and we don’t need the business features. So now we’re setup with extra clutter on the interface for something we don’t need. Is there some way to disable this?

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Hi @mcfarljw and welcome to the Community Forum!

I’m sorry to hear about the difficulty with this. I can understand how unwelcome they can be in your case. Unfortunately there is currently no option to remove the Portfolio tab or the Upgrade Button.

Other users have shared the same feedback in the Forum so I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with the main thread to gather all feedback in one place. I hope that is OK. If you haven’t yet, I would recommend to add your vote to it.

And while I can’t promise these options will be removed, our team will definitely consider it for future updates.

Brilliant Ryan! I learned something new today. And it work for the Portfolios over in the left sidebar as well.

I know they’re both coming back eventually…but it FEELS GOOD to have even this level of control.

This morning Asana had another blue banner nagging me to upgrade. Feels like the third or fourth time this month. So I put “Asana nagware” into Google and found this thread.

We have over 300 users on the premium plan. We spend over $35,000 a year on Asana.

I’m pretty good at being stoic, but the obnoxious “Upgrade” button is an INSULT which upsets me daily, even though I “mindfully” try to be “equanimous” about it, as Asana’s values would have it.

The nagging has inspired us to move business processes over to G Suite, where for around half the price per user we get an amazing amount of value, and ZERO nagging.

Over the last months we have moved around 50 users off Asana. I think if we are smart about it we can remove another 200 before our annual subs come due.

I used to be an evangelist for Asana - no longer.

Asana should be about the CUSTOMER. Your mission is to help all teams work together “effortlessly”.

What does it cost when 300+ users read about features that we are not going to buy? I promise you if this continues we will end up cancelling our Asana subscription altogether.

Please save us the daily effort of ignoring that stupid button and weekly effort of reading your spam.

Just give us the option of unsubscribing the organisation from it.

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On my main menu is this fun thing…

03%20PM

I.E. PORTFOLIOS—something I cannot use based on my company’s subscription type. Then why is it there?

My visual space + attention are sacred, esp. at work where time is money, friend. I do NOT appreciate such premium space being taken up by something I can’t even use—AS AN AD.

I’ve felt this way since it first arrived on my menu, and I’m resenting it more and more.

At first I was excited! I thought these were the long-awaited overview features I’d been waiting for. I was extremely disappointed to find I had no access to these features, despite being a “PREMIUM” user. As it continued to be on my menu, seeing it started to piss me off. Even more when I log in every day to find it’s been “Updated!”—continually drawing my valuable, difficult-to-magage-in-the-first-place attention (ADHD tyvm) and taking up more space.

If I can’t use it, I don’t want to see it!

Asana already has an attention problem. For example, looking at the My Tasks page is a paralysing act (LITERALLY, I GET PANIC ATTACKS) due to 1) the sheer amount of tasks one can see as a result of a full team using Asana and 2) very little customizability or organization available for the My Tasks page (a suggestion for improvements to this is another, much more optimistic, feedback post I’ve been drafting—but I’m clearly more motivated to write this one because I’m extremely cross about the Portfolio/Workload feature bait-and-switch). I’ve had to make my own workarounds to make Asana funcitonal for me, such as making special focus projects that I have to manually add tasks to (a pain which has kept me from using my workaround consistently) but ultimately have more control over.

To add insult to injury, Portfolios are a core project management feature Asana has always been lacking in my book (at least for paid users). Asana is an overwhleming project management tool because it’s SO in the weeds (see above paragraph). There are very few—and minimally functional—overview features available even to my team to actually manage projectS (plural). Without them, it’s effectively a suped up to-do list.

Granted, the gant charts were a REALLY nice add for flow—but that still doesn’t give me an informed overview of my projects. The Dashboard doesn’t count—it’s a useless card version of my favorites list on the left menu. Looks pretty, but pretty useless. There is no useful overview information given for Dashboard projects.

This lack of this KEY project management function (multi-project overview) has resulted in difficulty using Asana, and I’ve had to find ways to adapt. Namely by turning my projects into tasks, which is a difficult way to manage large projects. All this extra work just makes me avoid using Asana. I already have enough on my plate.

I do like Asana to a degree—but these limitations make it much less effective as a PM tool, and it’s ridiculous project overviews are a high-tier feature. I don’t need all the other bells and whistles of the Business tier, I need an affordable, easy-to-use (i.e. doesn’t take a ton of work to maintain) effective (i.e not overwhelming) PM tool for my team.

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