What's new in Asante Bot

⏰Pick when celebrations are sent

Birthday and work anniversary posts no longer have to go out at the default 10:00 AM. On the paid plan, Celebration Central now lets you choose the exact send time and the timezone it follows — handy for distributed teams and companies with their own morning rhythm.

• Set the send time in half-hour steps and pick any timezone, independent of your workspace default.
• One click resets celebrations back to the default schedule (10:00 AM, workspace timezone).
• Changes apply from the moment you save — no reinstall or support ticket needed.

🧾Clearer free vs. paid split for the celebration bot

The core birthday & work anniversary bot stays free forever — default templates, default send time, every plan. Custom celebration messages & GIFs, custom send times, and HRIS sync are now part of the paid plan, and all of them stay included in the 30-day free trial.

• Nothing is deleted if your trial ends: custom messages, HRIS connections, and schedules are kept and resume when you upgrade.
• The pricing page and settings screens now show exactly which celebration features belong to which plan.

🤖Let other apps give recognition points, and react to celebration posts

Turn on Allow Recognition Points From Bots in General Settings and any app already posting in your channels — your HRIS, deploy bot, or a Zapier workflow — can recognize teammates on its own. It works the same way people do: post a message with your recognition points emoji and an @mention, no API to build against.

• Reacting with your recognition points emoji to a birthday or work anniversary post now sends a point to the person being celebrated.
• The same goes for messages from other apps — react to pile on with a point of your own.
• Bots have no daily limit, but a single bot message can recognize at most 20 people so a misconfigured integration can't flood your workspace.
• Apps that give recognition points never appear on your leaderboard, in your team member list, or on your bill.

✉️A contact form for reaching us directly

Added a simple contact form so you can reach the team directly without digging up an email address.

🎨Custom celebration messages, GIFs, and AI-written suggestions

Birthday, hire-date, and work-anniversary posts can now carry a personal message and an attached GIF — and if you're stuck for words, Asante will draft a suggestion for you.

• Anniversary tenure requirements are now configurable per workspace from Settings.
• Suggested messages are tailored to the occasion — birthday, hire date, or work anniversary.

👥Faster recipient picker for private recognition points in big workspaces

The recipient list for private recognition points used to load every active teammate into one long dropdown. In larger workspaces it's now a searchable, type-ahead list instead, so finding the right person is quick no matter how big the team is.

🔒Private recognition points reliability fixes

Fixed a bug where private recognition points could end up posted publicly, and a bug where they weren't showing up in a recipient's contribution history.

⚙️Fixed missing teammates in large workspaces

Workspaces with hundreds of members could see people missing from stats or member lists. Fetching now works reliably no matter how big your workspace is.

🧹Cleaned up duplicate teammate profiles

Some workspaces ended up with duplicate profiles for the same person after changes in Slack. We cleaned up the existing duplicates and made sure new ones can't form.

📊Insights dashboard for HR admins

A new Insights section classifies every recognition message against your company's recognition categories using AI, surfaces culture recommendations based on what's trending across teams, and lets HR admins export the full dataset to CSV.

• Automatic classification runs on every new recognition message.
• Culture recommendations update as recognition patterns shift.
• One-click CSV export for reporting outside Slack.

🔁Recurring crowdfunded rewards

Crowdfunded rewards can now run on a repeating cycle instead of a single one-off campaign, so a popular reward can relaunch automatically once its cycle closes.

🔗HRIS integrations: BambooHR & Deel

Connect BambooHR or Deel and Asante keeps your employee roster in sync automatically — new hires, departures, and role changes flow through without a manual CSV upload.

🔔Sending private recognition points now notifies the recipient

Sending private recognition points wasn't always triggering the private Slack notification to the recipient. Fixed.

🔌Fixed a stale-data bug affecting celebrations

Fixed a bug where a scheduled celebration could go out using outdated workspace info.

📡Fixed a channel-fetching bug

Fixed an issue that could cause channel lists to fail to load in some workspaces.

🎂Grouped celebrations

When two or more birthdays, hire-date anniversaries, or work anniversaries fall on the same day, Asante now combines them into a single celebration post — with its own varied copy — instead of posting one message per person.

🧹Deactivated users are filtered out automatically

Slack users who have been deactivated are now excluded from the recognition directory, leaderboards, and admin views, instead of lingering as dead entries.

💳Fixed a subscription status bug

Fixed a bug that could show an incorrect or outdated subscription status for some workspaces.

👋Instant provisioning when you join a channel

Teammates are now created in Asante the moment they join a recognition channel, rather than waiting for the next scheduled sync — so brand-new joiners can send and receive recognition points right away.

⏳Trial-expired messaging

When a free trial ends, anyone who tries to send recognition now gets a private Slack message explaining the trial has expired and how to upgrade — instead of the request just quietly failing.

🔑Fixed a permissions bug affecting roles and birthdays

Certain user roles were hitting a permissions error that could also block their birthday celebration from posting. Fixed.

🔕Opt-out extended to individual teammates

Building on last month's workspace-level opt-out, teammates can now turn off their own birthday and anniversary shoutouts individually, without needing an admin to do it for them.

🔕Opt out of birthday & anniversary celebrations

Not every team wants Asante shouting out birthdays and work anniversaries. Admins can now turn celebration messages off for the whole workspace from Settings.

🖼️Fixed a profile photo bug

Fixed a bug affecting profile photos showing up correctly in recognition messages.

👤Account & role sync fixes

Fixed a handful of edge cases in account creation and Slack role handling that could leave some teammates without the right permissions after joining.

🤫Private recognition points

Send recognition that's visible only to the recipient (and admins) instead of posting to a public channel — for the kind of shout-out that's better said quietly.

🎯Reward visibility by group

Restrict specific rewards to specific user groups, so a Sales-only reward, for example, only shows up in the catalog for people in Sales.

🕒Fixed timezone bugs in kickoffs & reports

Ritual kickoffs and scheduled reports could fire at the wrong local time for workspaces outside US timezones. Scheduling now consistently respects each workspace's configured timezone.

👑A bigger recognition points allowance for owners & HR

Workspace owners and HR admins can now be given their own recognition points allowance, separate from — and typically larger than — everyone else's. Useful for recognizing across a whole org rather than just a team.

🌱Removed the 10-person minimum

Some functionality used to require at least 10 members in a workspace before it would activate. That floor is gone — small teams get the full experience from day one.

💳Pricing plans

Introduced plan-based pricing in the dashboard, so workspaces can see and manage their plan directly instead of going through us manually.

🏆Rituals

Rituals are scheduled, async team check-ins that run on their own: a kickoff message opens the ritual, a midday nudge keeps stragglers moving, and a last-call message wraps things up — complete with an auto-generated celebration image for whoever comes out on top.

• Kickoff, midday, and last-call messages are fully scheduled — no facilitator needed.
• Wrap-up posts include an auto-generated image, e.g. for an MVP shout-out.

📎Fixed a file-sharing bug

Fixed an issue affecting recognition points sent alongside a shared file.

💳Subscription-expired messaging on reactions

Reacting to a recognition post with an emoji now also surfaces the subscription-expired notice when relevant, not just sending new recognition points.

🖼️Refreshed weekly report

Updated the image and instructions on the weekly report message sent to Slack.

📡Channel handling fixes

Fixed an issue with channels that had been removed, and added a safeguard around the maximum number of channels a workspace can use.

📣Slack alerts for expiring subscriptions

Admins now get a Slack message when their subscription is about to expire, instead of finding out when things suddenly stop working.

🤫Quieter subscription-expired notice

The subscription-expired notice is now private — only the person who tried to send recognition points sees it — instead of blocking the action outright for everyone.

👋Smoother onboarding

New workspaces now get a welcome DM and a setup-invite message automatically once onboarding finishes, plus a fixed emoji-rendering bug in that welcome message.

💬Contact admin from the home tab

Added a 'contact admin' link to the Slack app home so teammates always have a clear point of contact.

👥Potential users

Asante now surfaces 'potential users' — Slack members it thinks should be invited — making it easier for admins to see who's missing.

🔒Fewer permissions requested at install

Asante now asks for fewer permissions when you install it in Slack — a smaller footprint, and less for your security team to review.

😀Fixed emoji reactions on solo messages

Reacting with an emoji to a message written by only one person was broken. Fixed.