Seats and capacity

A seat is not “a person who touched ScatterSpoke”. It is the right to enter the workspace and use the product. That distinction is the whole reason a survey with two thousand participants can run on a one-seat workspace.

Who consumes a seat

Only Seat Holders count against seats. A Seat Holder is a user who can enter the workspace and use platform features — whether their role is fully active or read-only, they occupy a seat either way.

A Participant is tracked so they can answer surveys and feedback questions, and has no workspace access. Participants never consume a seat, however many of them answer. The Billing settings page states the same rule in its own words: seats are for teammates who sign in to create surveys or use Ask.

The same human can be both over time. What decides seat usage is the Workspace Relationship, not the person.

Seat Capacity

Seat Capacity is the count of Seat Holders the workspace is currently entitled to have.

Where it comes from depends on the tier:

• Free is always one seat. The resolver returns 1 for Free regardless of any capacity stored on the record — a signup default, or a leftover from a downgrade, cannot grant a second seat.
• Pro and Business use the stored capacity, which billing sync writes from the paid subscription whenever the seat quantity changes in Stripe.
• Enterprise is unbounded. Its catalog entry has no seat maximum, so capacity resolution returns effectively no ceiling.

The per-tier bounds are Free exactly 1, Pro 1 to 5, Business 5 to 250 (the first five are included in the base price), and Enterprise with a minimum of 1 and no maximum. A seat change outside those bounds is rejected before it reaches checkout.

Seat Conversion

Granting a Participant workspace access is a Seat Conversion — an explicit change, never something that happens as a side effect of someone answering a survey or opening an invitation.

A Seat Conversion needs an available seat. If there is none, the workspace has to raise Seat Capacity first, which is a billing change. Pending invitations are counted as reserved, so available seats are Seat Capacity minus current Seat Holders minus invitations still outstanding. That is deliberate: two administrators inviting simultaneously should not be able to overshoot the paid quantity between them.

See Invite users and seats for the mechanics.

Over Seat Capacity

A workspace can end up with more Seat Holders than its Seat Capacity — most commonly after a downgrade. This is Over Seat Capacity, and it is a state, not a punishment.

Existing Seat Holders keep their access and can keep using whatever features their tier entitles them to. What stops is growth: no new Seat Holder can be added and no Seat Conversion can complete until the workspace has room again, either by removing Seat Holders or by increasing capacity.

Plan Tier is not Effective Tier

This is the distinction worth internalising, because almost every “why can’t I use this, we pay for it” question resolves here.

Plan Tier is what the workspace bought — the catalog level on the subscription record: Free, Pro, Business, or Enterprise. It changes only when someone deliberately changes plans.

Effective Tier is what governs access right now. Every feature gate reads Effective Tier, never the purchased Plan Tier.

The two are the same while billing is healthy. They diverge when it is not:

Situation	Plan Tier	Effective Tier
No subscription record at all	—	Free
Healthy paid subscription	as purchased	the same
Payment problem (past due)	as purchased	the same — access is not reduced yet
Scheduled Cancellation, still inside the paid period	as purchased	the same, until the period ends
Billing canceled	still reads as purchased	Free
Billing incomplete or unpaid	still reads as purchased	Free

So a workspace can hold a Plan Tier of Business and an Effective Tier of Free at the same time, and the second one is what the product obeys. Paid capabilities go quiet; the record still says Business until the plan is actually changed.

Caution

A payment problem is not the same as canceled billing. A past-due card leaves paid access effective while it is being resolved — the fall back to Free happens when the subscription reaches canceled, incomplete, or unpaid. That grace is why the Billing page’s payment-failed banner is worth acting on rather than ignoring.

The consequences reach further than feature flags. The Ask Pool and the Agent Survey pool both size themselves from Effective Tier, so a lapsed Business workspace gets Free’s allowances — see Usage Credits and the Ask Pool.

Restoring access

Because the fall back is derived rather than stored, nothing has to be repaired by hand. Settling the billing state returns the subscription to good standing, and the Effective Tier — with it, every gate, pool, and upgrade prompt — follows immediately. Surveys, responses, and Seat Holders are preserved throughout; a workspace that drops to Free loses reach, not data.

Managing billing covers the steps.