Asana (Project management)
Created by: Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein

Asana prices per-user with a structured tier ladder. The free 10-user cap is the mechanical upgrade trigger; Advanced tier captures the cross-functional buyer.

TL;DR: Asana's pricing structure scales with team size through per-user tiers (Free → Starter → Advanced → Enterprise), with the free-tier 10-user cap as the mechanical upgrade trigger. Advanced tier captures the cross-functional buyer who needs Goals, Workload, and timeline depth. The lesson for indie founders: when your value scales with both team size AND coordination depth, per-user pricing with feature-tier upsells captures both axes simultaneously.

What they sell: A cross-functional project management platform with tasks, projects, portfolios, goals, timelines, and workload coordination.
Who it's for: Growing cross-functional teams that coordinate work across multiple departments and need structured project tracking with goal hierarchies.
Pricing model: Per-user tiered subscription with structured upsell ladder
Payment frequency: Monthly or annual with annual discount
Free trial behavior: Free Personal tier IS the trial for small teams; paid tiers offer time-limited trials for evaluation.
Number of tiers: 4

Anchor pattern: Advanced tier as anchor
Advanced at approximately $25/user/mo anchors the page for serious cross-functional buyers. Starter at approximately $11 reads as the natural starting tier for growing teams; Personal Free is the entry; Enterprise sits behind a sales conversation. The unusual structural element is the Goals + Workload + Timeline bundle at Advanced — these features collectively represent what makes Asana 'real' for cross-functional teams, and the pricing reflects that bundled value.

Upgrade trigger: 10-user cap plus cross-functional feature need
The 10-user cap on Personal Free is the structural primary trigger — teams that adopt Asana and grow past 10 users have proven team-scale need. The secondary trigger from Starter to Advanced is the cross-functional feature need (Goals, Workload, Timeline) that emerges when teams coordinate across departments. Both triggers map to mechanical team-growth and structural-complexity events.

What's working:
10-user cap on Free is mechanical and predictable as teams grow past early-stage scale.|Per-user pricing aligns the bill with team-scale growth, which matches how Asana usage actually scales.|Goals + Workload + Timeline bundling at Advanced creates a clear value gap from Starter, justifying the 2.3x price jump.|Enterprise tier provides procurement-driven upsell without exposing custom pricing publicly.|Multi-function case studies (marketing, ops, engineering) reinforce the cross-functional positioning that justifies the per-user pricing model.|Mature integration ecosystem (Slack, Google Workspace, Salesforce) locks in customers who built workflows around the platform.

What to adapt:
When value scales with both team size AND coordination depth, per-user pricing with feature-tier upsells captures both axes simultaneously.|Mechanical user-count caps (10 on Free) convert predictably as teams grow, beating feature-gate caps that create more buyer friction.|Bundling structurally-related features at the anchor tier (Goals + Workload + Timeline at Advanced) creates a defensible price jump.

What to avoid:
Do not adopt per-user pricing if individual users do not get clear individual value. Asana works because every cross-functional team member uses the platform; PM tools where one user per team coordinates fail per-user pricing.|Do not gate cross-functional features (Goals, Timeline) at the cheapest paid tier. The Starter tier exists because not all paying teams need cross-functional depth; pricing the deep features into Starter dilutes the Advanced upgrade path.

Brunson lens:
Stack: Four-rung stack with progressive feature additions; Advanced tier is the visual anchor with structurally-related feature bundle.
Value ladder: Full Value Ladder (Free → Starter → Advanced → Enterprise) with mechanical and structural upgrade triggers at each rung.
Decoy/anchor: Advanced tier as anchor; Starter as reasonable growth tier; Personal Free as visible adoption surface.
Payment mechanics: Per-user monthly or annual with annual discount; no usage metering on task volume or storage.

Pricing last verified: 2026-05-18