Dear Seatable, I am a member of a team with plus subscription. Currently we habe 5 users in the team. I just figured out however that I could just as well remove 3 of those members and simply have them create their own free accounts and then invite them to the relevant apps and bases with the appropriate permissions by creating invitation links. Even though my base has more than 10.000 lines, when I invite a free seatable user to that base, that base does not contribute to that persons line-maximum and hence she can use the base for free. This seems counter intuitive and somewhat unfinished. Is there a reason for this setup? I don’t see any benefit of having that person in my team vs. just inviting her to the one relevant base and saving 50€ a year. I just wanted to let you know, in case you yourselves are unaware of this. Because I do like your service quite a lot and don’t want to exploit it, where it is not intended to be used that way.
best regards,
Béla
First of all, I am happy to hear that you like SeaTable Cloud! Please tell other people!
Secondly, we are aware of this possibility and I can assure you that this it is not a bug or an oversight. SeaTable intends to facilitate collaboration within and among teams. By sharing sharing bases and apps with other teams, we enable organizations like yours to collaborate on a new level at minimal cost.
Thirdly, feel free to share your bases and apps with as many users as you want - users in your team as well as other teams. As I said above, by sharing your bases with other free teams, you are not gaming our subscription model, but using the features and functions as intended.
Fourthly, and just to be clear, collaboration within a team is simpler and more powerful than across teams. In a team, you can …
collaborate in groups
use custom sharing permissions
share views
manage users centrally
enforce security settings for your entire team (e.g. 2FA)
add users to apps immediately
(This list is not meant to be exhaustive. There are more and will be more functions and features available in teams that you cannot use when sharing a base with users in other teams.)
Final words: Needless to say, we are not excited to see you reduce your paid subscription from 5 to 2. But, I see the bright side: With the budget restriction removed, you may end up sharing your bases and apps with many many more users. Some of those may decide to upgrade to one of our paid plans in order to use our advanced features themselves. In this case, we all benefit.
