Your studio: people, seats and billing

The product's own definition, printed under the Internal, Paid heading on the Team tab:

"A seat is a place you buy, and you pay for the ones you have whether or not anybody is sitting in them. Somebody who works here as their home studio takes one. Clients and reviewers arrive on a link and never need one. An outside helper comes in on a plan of their own, on their one free two weeks, or on a seat you hand them."

Two things follow from that. First, a seat is a place, not a person. A studio with five seats and three people in them is still paying for five, and whether to keep the two empty ones is the studio's own call. Second, every studio, even one that has never paid a cent, always owns exactly one seat: the founder's. Creating a studio makes you its first seat-holder. A free studio is not "zero seats", it is one seat that was never bought.

The team list is split into two sections for this reason:

• Internal, Paid: people who work in your studio. Filling one of these takes a seat.
• External: freelancers who help on a specific project of yours but keep their own Kadrenta studio. The list's own line under that heading says it plainly: "Here through a project, on no seat of yours, which costs you nothing."

An external is external through a project. Every row in that list names which job brought them in. Nothing here removes them from your studio, because they were never in it. They see only the project they were added to, and their own studio's name is what shows up beside your project on their side.

That said, "costs you nothing" is about your bill, and it is not unconditional on the other side. A freelancer who already pays for a seat of their own, anywhere, can come and go across studios with no clock on it. Someone on a free account gets a one-time, fourteen-day trial of working outside their own studio. After that, helping elsewhere comes with a plan of their own or a seat the host hands them. They find that out on their own screen when the invitation arrives; it is worth mentioning to a freelancer before you send the link.

Kadrenta has two separate role systems, at two different scopes, and they answer different questions.

Studio-level: owner, admin, member. The product hands out owner (the founder, automatically) and member (everyone invited after; an invitation carries no role picker). Admin is not shown in the interface, and the one thing it changes is that only an owner, not an admin, can cancel the studio's subscription.

Member is kept close to owner rather than close to a limited role, so a small studio that shares the bill and has no real hierarchy is not organised into one by the software. A member can invite people and do most of the studio's day-to-day work. What differs person to person is a separate set of permission switches (things like asking a freelancer onto a project, giving somebody a seat, or making somebody a lead), which any admin can turn on or off per colleague. Only one thing stays tied to the owner role specifically and cannot be delegated: buying or changing seats, and cancelling the subscription. Everywhere the product asks "may this person change what we pay," it is asking whether you are the studio's owner, not whether you hold some billing permission.

Project-level. Inside a single project the relevant facts are whether you are the project's owner, whether you are a lead on it, and whether you are on its crew at all. A lead runs the job day to day and can assign work to crew directly. Anyone without that standing can only offer work to a colleague and wait for them to accept it. Who gets made a lead is a separate permission of its own, an admin's call and not something leads hand to each other, so choosing who runs a job stays with the studio. This is a per-project standing rather than a studio-wide role, and it is independent of your studio-level owner/member role. A studio member can lead several projects, or none.

There are two separate "+ Add" buttons on the Team tab, one beside each heading, and they lead to two different invitations with two different prices.

+ Add beside Internal, Paid opens a dialog titled "Invite someone to work here", with the line: "Of the two invitations this studio can send, this is the one that takes a seat." It explains itself before you type anything: "This is for somebody coming to work for you who has no Kadrenta studio of their own yet: they get a seat here, and this studio becomes their Kadrenta. Working with a freelancer who already has one? Use + Add beside External instead, that costs no seat, and they keep their own studio." Type an email, press Create invite, and the dialog turns into "Their seat is waiting", showing the invitation link directly. That link is what you reach for if the mail lands in spam.

+ Add beside External opens a different popup, reachable from the Team tab or from a project's own settings. It asks which of your projects the freelancer is joining, because an external is always external through a specific project. Accepting it puts your project on their own studio's list. It never puts them inside yours.

If there is no seat free when you press the internal invite, the dialog shows the reason, as a caution rather than an error, and then the one thing that helps, depending on who you are. The founder of a paying studio gets a button that closes the popup and drops you straight onto the seat field with one more place already typed in. The founder of a studio that has never paid is sent to the Billing tab to start a subscription. Anyone else is told "Whoever started this studio is the one who can add a seat, and it takes effect the moment they do."

A seat invitation can only make a home for somebody who does not have one. It does not check whether the address you typed already runs a studio elsewhere, because that would be a way for anybody to find out whether a stranger's email is on Kadrenta. So if you invite someone who already has a studio, nothing is forced on them. The studio the invitation would have created is never theirs to take, and the refusal shows up on their side, not yours.

Prices are quoted excl. VAT; Dutch VAT (21%) is added on top wherever a figure is the headline. Seats are priced on a graduated ladder. The first five seats always cost the list price, the next five cost the middle price, and everything past ten costs the lowest price, however big the studio grows. That is not volume pricing: crossing a seat-count boundary never re-prices the seats below it, so hiring one more person never costs more than staying just under the line.

Pro is a separate thing to buy, not a bigger Studio plan. It is its own product on the invoice, with its own ladder that keeps the same shape (Pro sits at roughly 1.8–1.9× the Studio price at every size). Moving a studio between Studio and Pro costs nothing at the seam. It is a price swap on the one subscription item you already have, not a cancellation and a new purchase.

The public beta: while the beta is running, a seat costs a flat €19 a seat a month (Pro: €34), whatever plan or ladder step you would otherwise be on. Once a studio makes its first payment, that €19 is held for two years from that date. It does not reset and does not get shortened later, whatever the beta's own closing date turns out to be. When the two years are up, nothing moves on its own: we get in touch about what comes next, and no invoice will put a new amount in front of you that you have not heard about first.

Paying yearly charges ten months up front rather than twelve, the standard "two months free". That saving is quoted as its own line under the monthly figure rather than folded into a per-month number, so the amount shown is the amount that leaves your account.

Storage is sold separately from seats, as its own line on the same subscription, never as a second subscription with its own direct debit. Every paid seat already carries 250 GiB of room on its own (500 GiB on Pro). Buying more room on top costs €15 a block of 250 GiB a month, at either plan.

A free studio is not a stripped-down demo. Most of the product works on it, and nothing about what is already there gets taken away later if you stay under the line. What it limits:

• One seat. The founder's own place, and no more, as explained above.
• Three active projects, three canvases, three reviews running at once. The same number for all three, so the whole free plan is one sentence: three jobs, three boards, three reviews, or a mix. The reviews ceiling covers a review with no project and a review on a job alike; a shot-heavy job cannot hand itself extra trajects around the count. Archiving a finished project, or a finished review, gives the slot back, so nothing ever becomes a permanent blockage.
• 150 light files and 20 heavy files. Counters rather than a byte limit, so "87 of 150" is what you see rather than "3.2 of 5 GB". Light means images, PDFs and audio (capped at 16 MiB each on free); heavy means video (128 MiB) and 3D models (64 MiB).
• A 5 GiB storage safety net. This exists only as a backstop under the file counters above. On free, the counters are what you run into first.
• File delivery to a client is not on the free plan at all. Everything else (projects, tasks, canvas, review, clients, contacts, deals) has no ceiling of its own.

A link a client already has keeps working whatever a studio's count says. The reviews ceiling only refuses a new traject, never an address that already went out, and archiving is always the studio's own button, not something a ceiling does by itself.

Watching a review together is capped too, for every plan, not only free. A room holds at most 8 people at once on the free plan, 30 on Studio, 50 on Pro. It is a safety limit against a room running away rather than something paying removes entirely, and it turns away only the next person trying to join. Nobody already in the room is ever removed, including when the studio's plan changes while people are in it. Everything else on the page keeps working when a room is full: the video, the remarks, the rounds, the approval. Only watching together waits for somebody to leave.

None of these limits ever apply to the guest side of a collaboration. A client or reviewer on a share link never counts against anything, on any plan, and an external freelancer helping on your project costs you nothing regardless of your own plan. See "What is a seat" above.

The Billing tab is where a studio starts paying. The first purchase asks four questions in order, and each one changes the figures under it: Which plan (Studio or Pro, with Pro's extra points listed once you pick it), How many seats, Where the studio is based (which settles the VAT on the invoice), and How often you would like to pay (monthly or yearly). Pressing through takes you to a hosted Stripe Checkout page. Your card or bank details are typed on Stripe's own page, never on Kadrenta's, so a card number never passes through this app at all. The default payment method is SEPA direct debit, with card and iDEAL offered as alternatives on the same page.

Once a subscription exists, the Billing tab's own button becomes Open billing settings, which hands you to Stripe's customer portal for invoices and payment-method changes. The seat count itself moves to the Team tab, because, as the product puts it, changing how many seats you have is a question about who is on the team, not a question about an invoice.

Every seat or plan change shows you what it will do before you press anything: a preview of the exact invoice, drawn from Stripe rather than calculated here, so what you see on screen is never a rough estimate. What happens next depends on which direction you are moving.

Adding a seat (or moving up to Pro, or buying more storage) happens immediately, and is charged immediately. The part of the current billing period that is left is invoiced and taken from your payment method the moment you press the button. You see two figures: what is charged right now for the rest of this period, and what the ongoing invoice comes to afterwards. If the payment does not go through, nothing changes at all. The seat count stays where it was, nobody gets access, and the studio is not left holding a place it has not paid for.

Removing a seat (or blocks of storage, or moving down from Pro) waits until your renewal date, and pays nothing back. Everything you have, every seat, the plan, the room, stays as it is until the period you already paid for runs out. On that date the count drops, with no separate settlement. That matches the rule for cancelling outright: cancel, and no money comes back; you keep access for the time you already paid for, and then it ends. Money only ever moves forward, never back.

A few things follow from this:

• You can't type in a seat count below how many people are actually seated. Trying to shrink under your current head count is refused outright, with no seats lost. The way to get there is to free a seat first (see below), then lower the count.
• A change you've scheduled for your renewal can be seen and cancelled at any time before it lands. The Team and Billing tabs both show a pending change with its date, and a Call this off button that leaves the subscription exactly as it stands.
• Taking a seat back from a colleague is a separate act from lowering what you pay. The Take the seat back button on someone's row frees their place the instant you press it, ready for the next person, with nothing left waiting on someone who has stepped away. It does not touch the bill by itself. If you also want to pay for fewer seats, you still change the seat count, and that part follows the renewal rule above like any other reduction.

Freeing a place for someone else is instant; paying less for it is not.