Workspaces and seats
ProteinIQ billing is workspace-based. Every workspace has its own subscription, credit balance, members, and seat capacity.
Overview
Workspaces are the unit of collaboration in ProteinIQ. Each workspace has its own member list, subscription, seat limit, and shared credit pool. This means billing and usage are scoped to the workspace you are currently in, not your global user account.
Users can belong to more than one workspace and switch between them. That makes it possible to keep research groups, projects, or organizations separated while still using a single login.
Workspace ownership and billing scope
Workspace permissions determine who can manage billing and team membership. In practice, billing actions are permission-gated per workspace, so being an admin in one workspace does not grant billing control in another.
Personal workspaces are treated specially in settings and are protected from deletion. For commercial onboarding, the create flow also supports creating a paid-intent workspace before checkout, so teams can start with the right billing context from day one.
Free and paid workspace rules
A free workspace runs on free-tier limits until upgraded. ProteinIQ currently allows only one owned free workspace per user. Additional workspaces are still possible when they are created for paid billing.
There is also a workspace membership cap per user in the current implementation. If you hit this limit while joining or creating workspaces, reduce memberships or consolidate where possible.
How seat usage is calculated
Seat usage is based on occupied seats, which includes both active members and pending invitations. This is important because pending invites reserve capacity.
When there are no available seats, inviting additional users is blocked in the UI and users are directed to upgrade. The same seat accounting is also enforced during plan changes to prevent invalid downgrades.
Per-seat plans
ProteinIQ currently has two per-seat plans:
- Lab (minimum 2 seats)
- Teams (minimum 3 seats)
On these plans, credits are pooled at the workspace level and scale with purchased seats. In other words, increasing seats increases total monthly pooled credits for the workspace.
Managing members
From Settings -> Members, admins can invite teammates, set member roles, revoke pending invites, and remove members. Invites support bulk entry (up to 50 emails in one action), and each pending invite consumes a seat until it is accepted or canceled.
Practical recommendation
Before downgrading seats, clean up inactive members and stale invites first. This avoids downgrade rejections caused by occupied seats exceeding the target plan capacity.