Team and workspace billing

Summary#

A Metric Vault subscription belongs to one account: the person who completed checkout. That account is the workspace owner, its plan sets how many teammates can be invited, and its email address is the one that opens the billing portal. Teammates join the workspace to share the owner's monitored competitors, scheduled reports and saved analyses. Credits, too, follow the workspace: when a member runs a billed tool inside a workspace they have joined, it draws on that owner's plan and shared monthly allowance, not the member's own. That shared pool is the detail teams most need to plan around.

Purpose#

Agencies and in-house teams buy one plan and expect it to cover the group. This page explains precisely what "one plan for the team" covers in Metric Vault, so you buy the right tier and set expectations correctly before people start work rather than after someone hits a wall.

Overview#

Three separate things are often assumed to move together. They do not:

All four behave the way you would expect from a team plan. The credit row is the one to read carefully, below.

Before going further, it helps to know what a workspace is: a workspace is identified by its owner's account, and members switch into it to see and work with the owner's data. The concept is covered in Client workspaces and What teammates share.

How it works#

One subscription, held by one account#

Whoever completes checkout becomes the paying account. Their plan is what the platform reads for the seat cap and for every plan-gated feature in the workspace. There is no separate billing-contact role and no way to delegate billing access from inside the product — Manage Billing opens the portal for whoever is signed in, and it only finds a subscription under that email address.

A teammate who clicks it on their own account sees:

You are not on a paid subscription yet, so there is no billing to manage.

Pick a plan with the Upgrade button and your invoices, payment method and cancellation options will appear here.

If finance needs the documents, either the owner downloads them, or the owner changes the billing email in the portal to a finance address. See Invoices and receipts and Managing billing in the customer portal.

Seats are capped by the owner's plan#

The cap counts invited members. The owner is not one of them, so a plan listed as 5 seats is the owner plus 4 invitations.

An invitation occupies a seat from the moment it is sent, whether or not it has been accepted. If you are at the cap because of stale invitations, remove them before inviting someone new.

When a plan allows no invitations at all, the invite is refused with:

Team invites require the Pro plan or higher. Your account is on Starter.

When the cap is reached on a plan that does allow invitations:

Team seat limit reached (4 members on the Pro plan). Upgrade for more seats.

Seat mechanics, invitations and removal are covered in Seats and plan limits and Inviting teammates.

Credits follow the workspace you are working in#

This is the part to plan around. A billed tool or AI report is metered against the workspace you are currently in, not against whoever pressed the button.

• In your own workspace, runs draw on your plan and monthly credits.
• Switched into a workspace you have joined, runs draw on that owner's plan and their shared monthly credit pool. Every accepted member spends from the same pool.

What that means day to day:

• A teammate on a Free account can be invited into a Pro or Agency workspace and run its premium tools there, spending the owner's shared credits, with no paid plan of their own. This is what "seats plus credits" means.
• In their own workspace that same teammate is still on Free, so a run there is refused with This tool needs a paid plan. Free includes the 10 technical SEO tools; upgrade to Pro to unlock the rest. until they upgrade or switch back into the paid workspace.
• The switch is explicit. Pick the workspace on the Team screen first; a run always spends the credits of the workspace shown in the banner. The usage meter, likewise, shows the plan and credits of the workspace you are in.

Because the pool is shared, size the plan for the whole team's premium usage rather than one person's. If several people research heavily at the same time, an Agency allowance (or a custom pooled allowance) fits better than Pro. See Enterprise and custom agreements.

For what a credit is, see How credits work; for where the counter is visible, Tracking your usage.

What teammates get from the workspace#

Accepted members of a workspace can see the owner's monitored competitors, scheduled reports and shared analyses, and can work inside that context using the workspace switcher. Members are invited with a role, and the role controls what they may do rather than what they may spend. Roles are documented in Roles and what each can do. Nobody can be invited as an owner: ownership belongs to the account that created the workspace.

What happens when the plan changes#

That last row deserves attention. There is no ownership-transfer function, so if the owner's account is closed or lost, the workspace and its subscription go with it. Owning the subscription under a company-controlled address is the protection. See Workspace ownership.

What billing does not do#

Being explicit here avoids sizing a rollout on something that is not there:

• There is no per-seat pricing and no per-seat billing. Seats come with the plan; adding a person does not change the invoice.
• There is no per-member spending cap or per-member credit allocation. Any accepted member can spend from the whole shared pool.
• There is no per-member breakdown of who spent what. The owner's usage meter shows the workspace's total spend, since every member in the workspace draws on it.
• Client workspaces, monitored URLs, rank alerts and tracked prompts are published as plan figures but are not automatically capped by the system. Size them commercially rather than assuming enforcement. See Full plan comparison.

Choosing the right plan for a team#