So, I’m really confused about how the subscription works (premium vs. free). From what I can tell after some testing, it appears that when you subscribe to “Premium” you aren’t actually subscribing for yourself as a user but only for a specific workspace. I just have a really hard time wrapping my head around that.
For example: I have my one main workspace on the Premium plan, with multiple folders and various people having access to different folders. My coworker has her own separate workspace and we have a couple spreadsheets that we collaborate on within her workspace. Recently, she wanted to upgrade her account to Premium so that she could use the Gantt chart view in one of her spreadsheets. However, because of these spreadsheets which I collaborate with her on, she us unable to upgrade to Premium without paying not only a license fee for herself, but also for me. In other words, when she tries to upgrade her workspace, it is requiring that she pay for 2 licenses (herself and me). However, that doesn’t make sense because I am already paying for the Premium plan. Why should she be required to pay for extra licenses when I’m already subscribed to the Premium plan?
Another problem: to upgrade her workspace without paying for other collaborators’ premium plans, she must change the permissions on all the collaborative documents to “Edit” rather than ‘owner’ or ‘collaborator’ … and this is the important point: she must do this within files that do not use any of the premium plan features. In other words, if she upgrades to premium just to use the Gantt view in a single workbook within her workspace, then other spreadsheets are essentially downgraded to capabilities less than the Free account allows (unless she pays extra for licenses for other users just so that they can continue being collaborators on those files). Note: A free workspace allows others to be Collaborator/Manager/Owner, but if you upgrade to Premium, then you can no longer allow people to be Collaborator/Manager/Owner without paying a license for them.
Another problem: I just realized that in my workspace I was paying for an unnecessary number of licenses just because somebody was marked as a Collaborator. After some testing, I found that all it takes is to use the sharing options in a spreadsheet and mark a user as a Collaborator, and you can end up unknowingly increasing the number of licenses you are paying for. There wasn’t a notice or anything to indicate that my number of paid licenses increased, and there isn’t anything to indicate whether any of the users are already licensed users or not. This could be a pretty costly mistake since a user could easily add a bunch of users without realizing that their subscription costs just went up.
My preference would be that the subscription be based on the user rather than user+workspace. Either that, or if you upgrade a workspace to Premium, it should allow all users to access the Premium features within the files in that workspace. Or, don’t require the “Collaborator” and “Manager” to be licensed users.