Tiers & billing

A tier is the plan a workspace is on - it decides which features that workspace has. There are four, and they stack: each one includes everything below it. Plans are counted in seats. Contact dembrane for current pricing - see what it costs.

What each plan gives you#

What each one is for:

• Free - one hour of recording, a single user, open registration, and the same secure, multilingual transcription as every paid tier. It’s the only tier with an hour cap. On Free the heavier features (chat, reports, extra workspaces) are gated, and you’ll be prompted to upgrade when you reach for them.
• Innovator - unlimited hours, plus the option to point your own ChatGPT or Claude at your conversations over MCP instead of dembrane’s built-in analysis. Coming soon, once the MCP integration ships.
• Changemaker - adds dembrane’s built-in analysis on EU-hosted language models, audit logs, and white labelling.
• Guardian - everything in Changemaker on an EU-sovereign, CLOUD-Act-safe stack for the strictest compliance needs. Coming soon.

What it costs#

When you reach something that isn’t on your plan, dembrane opens a short set of questions about what you need and lets you pick a time to talk it through. You can also write to [email protected].

What a seat is#

A seat is what a person occupies in a workspace. Most roles use one - owner, admin, member, billing, and external. The observer role is free and never does.

Two things make seats easy to live with:

• They’re metered, never blocked. You can always add someone - dembrane counts the seat and reflects it in your bill rather than stopping the invite. Pending invites count too; observer invites don’t. See invites & access.
• A person counts once per workspace. Seats are pooled across the workspaces in a billing account, and the same person in the same workspace is a single seat, not one per project.

How billing is organised#

Billing attaches to a billing account, scoped one of two ways:

• Pooled across your organisation - the default. All your internal workspaces share one account and pool their seats.
• Per workspace - used for external-client workspaces, where a partner runs work for someone else. That workspace gets its own account so the client’s usage stays cleanly apart.

The full split, and what it means for data ownership, is in data ownership & compliance.

Payments go through Mollie for workspaces that already hold a subscription. Where dembrane needs to invoice offline - larger or public-sector customers paying by bank transfer - staff can arrange managed invoicing (staff billing guides).

Requesting an upgrade#

If you’re a member without billing rights, you don’t pay the bill - you request an upgrade (a new workspace or a higher tier), and someone with billing rights, or dembrane staff, approves it. The same flow gates a few transitions, like moving a workspace out of “open”, which needs Innovator or above.

Related#

• Roles & permissions - who can see invoices and change the plan.
• MCP & bring-your-own-LLM - the coming-soon Innovator integration.
• Data ownership & compliance - internal vs external billing and the sovereign stack.
• Organisations & workspaces - what shares a billing account.
• Invites & access - how seats are counted as you add people.
• Library & analysis - the built-in analysis Changemaker unlocks.