# Team Billing & Credits

A Team plan puts everyone on **one bill** and **one shared pool of credits**, instead of each person managing their own subscription. This page explains how team billing, seats, pooled credits, and ownership work.

See what your team is using under **Team → Settings → Plan & billing**. Live plan and pricing details are at [town.com/pricing](/content/pricing/index.html).

## Pooled credits

- **The team shares one credit pool.** On the Team plan, credits are allocated per seat (e.g. a per-seat allotment × your number of seats) and **pooled** — anyone on the team draws from the same balance.
- **It refills each cycle** and doesn’t roll over, just like personal credits. See [Credits & Usage](/content/docs/billing/credits/index.html).
- **Track it under Team → Settings → Plan & billing**, where you can see the team’s total usage across members.

## Credits: team first, then personal

If a member is on both a paid personal plan and a paid team, work draws down **team credits first, then their personal credits**. This means active team members lean on the shared pool before touching anything they pay for individually.

**Billing follows team membership, not where the work happens.** Once you’re on a paid team, everything your Townie does for you draws the team pool first — work in the team, personal chats, and routines on your personal email alike. There’s no per-member setting that changes this: a team can’t exclude a member from the pool or bill a specific member’s usage to their own plan, and the pool has no per-member limits — the usage view shows who used what, but everyone draws from the same shared balance.

When the shared pool runs out, credits are consumed in this order:

1. **Team plan credits**, then any [promotional credits](/content/docs/billing/credits#promotional-credits/index.html) on the team.
2. **Your own plan credits**, then your own promo credits — only if your personal plan is a paid one.
3. **Team overage**, if a team Owner or Admin has set the team’s pay-as-you-go spend cap above $0. Note this comes _after_ a paid member’s own included credits: a member with their own paid plan spends those before the team starts paying overage.
4. **Your own overage**, if you’ve enabled it on your personal plan (see [Overage & pay-as-you-go](/content/docs/billing/credits#overage-pay-as-you-go/index.html)).

When none of those have headroom left, that member is paused until the next refresh or until the team adds headroom.

**Only a plan you’re genuinely paying for absorbs the overflow.** A **Free** personal plan — or a paid one still inside its **free trial** — isn’t part of the chain, even if it’s holding promotional credits. A member on either is paused once the team’s pool and any team overage are used up.

Two team shapes are the exception: a **free team** and a team still on its **free onboarding team trial** don’t take over billing for a member who already has their own active plan. Those members keep spending their **personal** credits even though the team shows a credit balance — so a routine running on a personal account draws personal credits, not the team’s trial credits. Once the team is on a paid Team plan, the pooled balance covers them.

If a member has **no** active plan of their own, any active team plan covers them — including a free team or a team on its onboarding trial.

Belong to more than one paying team? Work bills to one team at a time — the one you’ve chosen on **Settings → Plan**, or your highest plan by default — and falls back to your other paying teams, then to your own paid plan last, if that pool is used up. Choosing a team on **Settings → Plan** only picks _which paying team_ covers you — it can’t redirect your usage to your personal plan while a paid team can still pay.

### Planning around a heavy user

Say a team of six includes one especially heavy member — a founder burning tens of thousands of credits a month — who also keeps their own paid personal plan. Their usage hits the **shared team pool first**, just like everyone else’s, so one heavy member can drain the pool ahead of their teammates; there’s no way to point their usage at their own plan while the team can still pay. Once the pool is empty, that member switches to their **own plan’s credits** (before the team pays any overage), while teammates without a paid personal plan keep going only if team overage is enabled — otherwise they pause. If you need a heavy user’s spend kept off the shared pool entirely, the only lever is membership itself: someone who isn’t on the team bills their own plan.

## Seats

- **Adding a seat** takes effect immediately and is charged prorated for the rest of the current cycle.
- **Removing a seat** doesn’t refund the middle of a cycle — the seat stays usable as a **reusable slot** until the end of the cycle, so you can assign it to someone else in the meantime.

## Starting or upgrading to a Team plan

Here’s the where-to-click path to get a team onto the Team plan:

1. **Create the team.** Click your avatar in the **bottom-left**, hover **Teams**, and choose **Create a team**, then invite members by email (see [Teams](/content/docs/teams/index.html)).
2. **Open the team’s billing.** Go to your team and open **Settings → Plan** — the team’s billing page, where the **Owner** or a team **Admin** chooses the Team plan and sets the number of seats. You can also jump straight there from your personal **Settings → Plan** using **Manage team billing**.
3. **Cancel the individual plans.** If members were on their own paid plans, cancel those at renewal so each person keeps the access they’ve already paid for through the end of their cycle. See [Cancellation & Refunds](/content/docs/billing/cancellation-and-refunds/index.html).

An existing personal plan isn’t rolled into the team plan — the two are billed separately, and neither the plan nor its credits move across. Keep both if you want to separate personal and team usage, or cancel the personal one at the end of its cycle and run everything on the team.

Because they’re separate, a scheduled change on your personal plan — a queued downgrade or cancellation — doesn’t have to be cleared first: you can start or upgrade a team plan while it’s still pending, and it goes through as scheduled on your personal plan.

Team billing lives under the **team’s** own **Settings → Plan** (distinct from your personal plan page). The **Owner** and team **Admins** can manage it.

## Transferring ownership

The Owner and team Admins can manage billing, but top-level ownership belongs to the team **Owner**. Transferring ownership to another member isn’t a self-serve control today — email [support@corp.town.com](mailto:support@corp.town.com) to hand ownership to someone else (for example if the current owner is leaving), and we’ll make the change.

## Handled by our team

A few billing situations for teams aren’t self-serve today and are handled by our support team. Email [support@corp.town.com](mailto:support@corp.town.com) for:

- Merging or consolidating accounts across multiple emails
- Switching a primary account
- Trial extensions or resets
- Non-profit / student / founder discounts
- Fully offboarding a departed teammate — removing someone from the team is self-serve (see [Removing a member](/content/docs/teams#removing-a-member/index.html)), but deleting their personal account and stopping their routine emails / mail forwarding is handled by our team