When do member seats get used up?

@alexis or others Periodically I think this question can effect users decision on setting up there structure, especially with consultants. Here are some of my understandings that definitely can be wrong.

Free Version: All participants are counted against the use of member seats whether having the same organizational email or a personal email.

Premium Version: This one seems to be a little more complex but maybe not. Are member seats only taken by users having the same organizational email address or can Team Member/Project members having an email address that is not part of the organizational email address take up a seat in the Premium pricing.

Thanks

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@James_Carl - Members of premium Organizations are those people that have the company’s email address. These folks count as a license.
Guests of premium Organizations are external contractors, etc. that don’t have the company’s email address. These folks don’t count as a license.

For premium Teams within a free Organization, all users count as a license.

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@Shannon_McNeil Great information, I obviously know what a Team within an organization is but are you making a distinction as to what the definition of a Premium Team within a free Organization is or are you saying all Team members regardless if they use the Organization email address count as a member. Are there any other “uses of free account licenses” by non organizational emails such as a Project member. I have a premium account so I don’t pay as much attention to this. Thanks for the help.

Hey @James_Carl -

Great question!

As you know, in both the free and premium version of Asana, organization membership is defined by email domain. This means that anyone who shares the org domain, is automatically considered a member and anyone who doesn’t is considered a guest.

In the premium version of Asana, we allow access to unlimited guests which means that guests do not take up a seat within your membership limit. To go into detail:

  • In the case of a premium org plan, any guest within the org does not contribute to the membership limit.

  • In the case of a premium team in a free org plan, a guest that is a member of the premium team does not count towards the membership limit.

In both cases if guests are added at the project or the task level, the same logic still applies.

We are making changes to this data model and some newer domains might not fall under these terms. In any case, taking a look at the admin panel or the team settings will help you manage your users and help you better understand who is contributing to your overall membership count.

Nicola

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@Nicola My confusion is what a Premium Team is in a free organization. Is there a non-premium team in a free organization. As a champion I am very familiar with Teams, and Teams in a Premium or paid organization but I don’t know what you mean by a Premium Team in a free Organization that members take up seats. Thanks

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Hey @James_Carl,

When deciding to upgrade, you can either upgrade an entire organization or you can choose to upgrade a single team within an organization.

For example, let’s suppose that we have the Asana organization with teams: Customer Success, Marketing, and Sales. If I am deciding to upgrade, I can choose to upgrade the entire organization which means that all teams will have premium status. Or, I can choose to upgrade the Customer Success team and have the other teams be free within my free organization.

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Thank you, this clears it up. I never kmew you could have anything but a free or premium organization. The concept of a Premium Team within a free organization is new to me and I think I’m probably not the only one. Asana remains a very generous corporation advocating collaboration to a lot of free users. Thanks again.

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Hi @Nicola,
I have a similar scenario that I need to confirm before we upgrade. We are a charity that has volunteers throughout the year. I would like to set up our TEAM within the organisation on the premium and limit it to 15 members. (There are 11 of us full time in our team). So throughout the year when we have volunteers and/or interns we would like them to use Asana and assign them tasks within our projects but keep them on the free package. They will have the same organisation email as us. Is this possible? or would each volunteer need to be added to the team which would then exceed the 15 member limit?
Thank you in advance.
Antony

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They can’t have your domain name or it will use up seats. Just add them under their personal email address to projects and you would be fine.

Hurray for the consultant community here in Asana! This is great!

So, this is probably beating a dead horse by kicking this thread alive again, (and this is probably a “duh” question), but based on your first post on this thread you had said:

“As you know, in both the free and premium version of Asana, organization membership is defined by email domain. This means that anyone who shares the org domain, is automatically considered a member and anyone who doesn’t is considered a guest.”

So, if our organization is a free organization, do guests count towards our user license limit, or just members with the same domain name as our organization?

It was my understanding that all would be regardless of the address in a free organization. Just look at your organization settings and you should be able to determine this. There was a post today that the 15 count was at the team level within an organization. I am suspicious of this answer but it may be correct.

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For reference: Asana’s article(s) on Limited Access Members Workspace basics | Product guide • Asana Product Guide :slight_smile:

Thank you for the support, @Alexis and @James_Carl. I also looked up Marie’s response in one of the other threads here, this defnitely cleared it up:

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Nicola, you state “In the case of a premium team in a free org plan, a guest that is a member of the premium team does not count towards the membership limit.” This is the opposite of what Shannon said earlier in this thread, “For premium Teams within a free Organization, all users count as a license.” Can you please clarify?

My experience says Shannon is correct, however I would ask why would a limited access member count against a premium license limit? Why even have a limited access option for a premium team in a free Org account if I have to pay for the license anyway?
Thanks

Hi @Dennis2 - Asana’s structure regarding limited access members was updated, which likely accounts for the discrepancy in what you’ve read. I recommend that you take a look at this background information from the Asana Guide about Limited Access members:

I read through this thread and am also very confused.

We have a premium account. We want to get engineering visibility into our design tickets (because engineering uses Jira).

If we invite all of our engineering members to view our tickets (they all have company email addresses), will they take up seats?

If so, is there a way to get visibility and transparency between engineering and design without paying for 200 (roughly our number of engineers) more seats?

Even more context:
A different engineer runs standups each week (for the experience). So if we wanted that engineer to be able to just show our Asana board, would they need to take up a seat?

Surely that’s not the case. That would be insane.

I know of no way that an employee with company email that is being used for Asana can avoid being counted as using or requiring a seat. While guest in premium and above are unlimited they presumably do not have a company email address. On rare occasions I guess it is possible to set up a pseudo company email that is not an individual to take one seat. I am not sure multiple can be logged into Asana using the same email address though (pseudo) to view high level. There are some robust reporting from third party vendors as well as Asana. Asana Apps and Integrations • Asana

This is clear as mud. When I go to change members to limited access, I don’t have that option! I don’t want to pay for seats in my organization for members who need access but will never use most of the features!