Your crew allowance and account usage
Your plan is a flat monthly price with an allowance of active crew built into it. Most accounts never think about it, because reusing the same trusted suppliers all season costs nothing extra and a quiet month costs nothing at all. This article explains what actually counts, what going over costs with worked examples, and where to see your own numbers, so a big event is never a surprise on the bill.
It covers the allowance, what makes a crew member active, what extra crew cost, how the count and the charge are taken, the credit the charge comes out of, the Account usage card, and how team seats differ from crew.
What is included
Both plans, Professional and Hospitality, include 25 active crew members. The allowance is the same on each: Hospitality adds the catering and back-of-house tools, not more crew.
Above 25, extra active crew are charged at 5 cents per person per day, which works out at roughly $1.50 a month each, and only for the days they are actually active. That shape is deliberate. A one-off spike for a marquee wedding or a busy gala week should cost a few dollars, not force you onto a bigger plan you do not need for the other eleven months.
What makes someone active
Crew is anyone you give access to: staff, contractors, suppliers, second shooters, or people you are onboarding. In 1pm they all live in the same place, so the counting rule is the same for all of them.
Someone is active while they hold a live share link on either:
- an event dated today or later that is confirmed or tentative, or
- an onboarding portal that is still open.
Three things follow from that, and they are the parts worth knowing.
They count once. A crew member on eleven events this month is one active crew member, not eleven. Your regular AV supplier costs the same whether you use them twice a year or every weekend.
Past events do not count. Once an event has finished, the people on it drop out of the count on their own. For a booking that runs over several days, that is after its last day, not its first. You do not have to tidy anything up. Completing or cancelling a booking does the same thing.
Revoking a link ends it. If someone is finished early, or was added and never needed, revoking their share link makes them inactive from that point.
Contacts in your address book are not crew. Someone only starts counting when they have a live link on live work.
Your clients do not count. A booking's Client contact can hold a link to their own event portal, and that link is left out of the count. Only the people working the event count. The rule is per booking: if you hire somebody as crew on one job and they are the client on another, they count for the job they are working.
Two kinds of record are left out of the count entirely: event templates, and anything belonging to the sample data a new account is seeded with. So the ten demo contacts on the sample gala never count towards your 25, whether or not you've got round to removing them.
What it costs: worked examples
The maths is one line: every active crew member above 25 costs 5 cents for each day they are active. Here is what that comes to in five real shapes of business, using a 30-day month and the $20 Professional price.
| Situation | Active crew | For how long | Extra that month | Total on Professional |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A photographer with a second shooter and a few regulars | 8 | All month | Nothing | $20.00 |
| A venue with a standing roster of suppliers | 30 | All month | $7.50 | $27.50 |
| A caterer whose gala week needs extra hands | 45 | 6 days | $6.00 | $26.00 |
| A planner running a festival season | 60 | All month | $52.50 | $72.50 |
| 300 crew through the year, never more than 25 at once | 25 | All year | Nothing | $20.00 |
On Hospitality the extra is identical and sits on top of $40 instead of $20, so the festival month above is $92.50. On an annual plan the same extras apply on top of the annual rate. Figures exclude team seats and any GST or VAT.
The fourth row is the one worth reading twice. Sixty active crew every single day of the month, more than double the allowance, is $52.50. That is what running genuinely large costs, and it is still less than the step up between tiers on most tools.
How the count and the charge are taken
The count is taken once a night and the charge is for the number recorded at that moment. Three things follow.
Short-lived crew are free. Somebody you add at nine in the morning and revoke at five in the afternoon never reaches a count, so they cost nothing. The same goes for a link you issue and cancel the same day.
A tidy-up takes effect that night. Close a portal or revoke a batch of links this morning and tonight's count is already lower.
The number you are charged is the number you were shown. The charge is worked out from the reading that was taken, not from a fresh recount later, so what comes off your credit always matches what the Billing page showed for that day.
Where the money comes from
Extra active crew are drawn from account credit, which you add yourself on the Billing page in amounts of $20, $50 or $100. Those amounts are before tax: where GST or VAT applies, Stripe adds it and shows you the total before you pay, and the credit you get is the amount you picked. Adding credit takes you to Stripe to pay, and the credit lands on your account as soon as the payment goes through.
If a top-up is refunded, or the payment is disputed with your card provider, the credit it bought is taken back off your balance. A partial refund takes back the same share of the credit.
Extra crew are only charged while your subscription is running. That means on a free trial, on an active plan, or while a failed payment is being retried. If your subscription is paused, cancelled or has expired, the count is still recorded and shown, but nothing is drawn from your credit and you are not emailed about it. The same applies while 1pm support has suspended the account.
The Billing page shows your balance, what today's count comes to, what you have been charged so far this calendar month, and a running list of every top-up and every daily draw with the balance after each one. The number builds in front of you rather than arriving as a surprise.
If your credit runs out, nothing is switched off. Your crew keep their links, your bookings and portals carry on, and the daily charge keeps being recorded against the account. We email you to say the balance has gone below zero, and adding credit clears it. We do not cut off crew part way through an event.
How you find out you have gone over
Two things tell you, because one of them cannot cover every case.
On screen, as it happens. When an action takes you past 25, 1pm says so immediately, with the number you are now at and what it costs. The action still goes through: going over is priced, not refused. You are told once, on the action that crosses 25; adding more people after that does not repeat the message.
By email, the next morning. Some crossings have nobody at a keyboard to warn. A booking flipping to confirmed, an event date moving into the future, or a crew member registering themselves through a public link can all push the count up on their own. The night the count first goes above 25 we email the account owner with the number, how many are chargeable and what it comes to per day. If the count then keeps climbing, we email again each time it reaches double the number in the last email, so a public registration link that fills up quickly does not go unnoticed.
Seeing your own numbers
Open Billing from the account menu and scroll to the Account usage card at the bottom. It shows two figures:
- Active events & portals. Confirmed or tentative events that haven't finished yet (dated today or later, or still running if they last several days), plus any open portals.
- Active crew. People with a live share link on one of those, counted once each. Where the same people are spread across several records, a second figure appears in brackets giving the total across all their events and portals, so you can see the difference between fifteen people and fifteen people on forty events. When nobody is on more than one, the two numbers are identical and the bracket is left off.
These are live counts of the account as it stands right now, not a bill. They go up when you add crew to an upcoming event and come down as events pass, portals close, or links are revoked. They are the account owner's view, so they are hidden from a colleague switched in through account sharing.
Below them, once there is something to say, sits the crew usage section with the allowance bar, your credit balance and the top-up buttons. It stays hidden for an account that has never gone above 25, because a charge panel for a charge you have never had is just noise.
Team seats are a different thing
It is easy to conflate the two, so worth being clear.
- Crew are the people you share links with. They do not log in, they do not have a password, and they see only their own filtered view. They come out of your 25.
- Team members are colleagues who sign in to your account and work in it: building events, editing the run of show, managing contacts and answering requests. They are a seat on your subscription at a flat $4 a month each, and they have nothing to do with the crew allowance.
A team member shares your plan, so on a Hospitality account they get the catering tools too. Seats can be added or removed at any time and the change is prorated.
Keeping the number where you want it
If you would rather stay inside the 25, the levers are all in your hands:
- Revoke links for crew who have finished, rather than leaving them live indefinitely.
- Close portals once an onboarding round is done. A closed portal stops counting, and the documents people submitted stay exactly where they are.
- Keep tentative events honest. A tentative event dated in the future counts as active, so a lead that quietly died is worth marking as such.
None of this is urgent housekeeping. It is simply where the number comes from if you want to move it.
Related articles
- How subscribing works covers the plans, the trial and your first charge.
- Managing your subscription covers changing plan, updating your card and cancelling.
- Working with a team covers inviting colleagues and what they can do.
- Your monthly email allowance covers the other limit on the account.
- Resending a crew link covers issuing and revoking the links that decide the count.