Workspaces and roles

Everything belongs to a workspace

Links, domains, bio pages, analytics, and API keys are owned by a workspace rather than by a person. One was created for you when you signed up, so this is already true even if you have not invited anyone.

This is what makes handing work over painless: someone leaves, and their links do not leave with them.

You get one workspace of your own, and you can be invited into any number of other people's (a client's or an employer's, say), with no limit on any plan, Free included. The workspace switcher at the top of the sidebar moves between them, and the whole dashboard reloads against the one you choose.

Everything about the workspace lives in one of two places. Team and Domains have rows of their own on the rail, because they are recurring questions (who has access, and which domains our links run on), and Billing, what we are paying, is the section after Workspace in Settings. The rest is configuration you set once, under Settings: Workspace holds the name and logo (General), how visitors and conversions are measured (Tracking) and, at its foot, ownership and workspace deletion (Danger zone); Audit log is the workspace's record of who did what; and API keys and Webhooks sit under Developers.

Naming your workspace and giving it a logo

Settings › Workspace is one page you scroll, and General is the first group on it. That is where the workspace gets its name and its logo, and where it says who owns it and what your role is. Anyone in the workspace can open the page and read what is set; only owners and admins can change it, and everybody else sees the same rows as plain values. The logo saves the moment you choose or remove it (Remove can be undone from the notice); the name saves when you press Save or Enter. The name is what the workspace switcher shows; the logo appears on invitation emails, so teammates can tell workspaces apart there.

A logo is optional. Without one, invitation emails fall back to Clerk's generated mark and Settings › Workspace shows the workspace's initials. The workspace switcher at the top of the sidebar does not carry a logo: it names the workspace, so it does not sit next to the ShortZen mark as a second badge.

The four roles

Rows marked with a plan carry a second condition: your plan has to include the capability as well. Bio pages are included on every plan, including Free, and inviting members and changing roles from Pro. Being an owner or admin of a workspace on a lower plan is not enough on its own: the action is refused with an upgrade prompt rather than a permissions error. The remaining rows are decided by role alone.

Anyone can remove themselves from a workspace at any time: leaving is not an admin action. Leave workspace is on your own row on Team and in the Danger zone at the foot of Settings › Workspace. Removing somebody else is, and you cannot remove a member who outranks you.

Viewer is worth using. Executives and anyone who only needs to see the numbers should be a viewer: it removes the possibility of an accidental edit entirely. Be deliberate about inviting a client, though: roles apply to the whole workspace, so a viewer sees every link, domain and report in it, including other clients’ work. To show one client only their own numbers, send them a shared report link instead of a seat.

Who pays, and what everyone gets

A workspace has one payer, normally its owner. The payer's plan sets what everyone in that workspace can do while they are working in it.

So the right question is not "what plan am I on" but "what plan is this workspace on". The badge at the bottom of the sidebar answers it for whichever workspace you are currently in.

Seats

A seat is a person in the workspace. Pending invitations hold a seat too. Otherwise, sending five invitations to a three-seat workspace would look fine until people started accepting. On Business the seats are editors, and a viewer takes one of that plan's 10 separate viewer seats instead; on every other plan a viewer uses a seat like anyone else. At capacity, Invite member is disabled with the reason, and a sentence under the roster says the same thing for everyone in the workspace, not only the people who can invite.

Team seats, by plan

Free 1 · Starter 1 · Pro 3 · Business 10

Transferring ownership

Ownership transfer moves the owner role to another member. The workspace's plan and billing stay exactly where they were. They belong to the workspace itself, not to whichever member happens to own it, and so does the card on file: on a paid plan it keeps renewing on the previous owner's card until the new owner replaces it in Billing. The owner transfers it from the Danger zone at the foot of Settings › Workspace (Transfer… opens a dialog where the new owner is chosen), or with Make owner on a member row on Team. Deleting the workspace sits in the same section; its row says what has to be true first: you belong to another workspace, and it has no active subscription. If your own workspace is the only one you are in, it cannot be deleted, and you cannot create a second to get round that: you get one. To use it for something else, rename it in the same Settings page: links, team and billing stay as they are. To delete it, accept an invitation to another workspace first; to close everything, delete your account.

When something is set elsewhere

Role and membership changes are applied here first and then synchronised with our identity provider. If that second step is briefly unavailable, the change still takes effect for you immediately and the synchronisation retries itself in the background. You do not need to do anything.

Owner and viewer exist only in ShortZen: our identity provider has no equivalent of either, so a role change made in its own dashboard cannot express them and will be refused. Change roles here, on the Team page, and they will be reflected everywhere else.