Team roles and licenses explained
What Primary Owner, Admin, and Member actually control, how licensed seats work, and what happens when a license is removed from someone.
Team and Enterprise organizations on iShared.app are built around two related but separate ideas: roles, which control what a member can do, and licenses (seats), which control who's allowed to send transfers under the organization at all.
Roles
- Primary Owner. The one account with ultimate control - full billing access, can change anyone's role, and can transfer primary ownership to someone else. Every organization has exactly one; you can't remove or demote the last one.
- Admin. Can manage members, licenses, and organization settings, but doesn't have the Primary Owner's exclusive controls (like transferring ownership itself).
- Member. Can send transfers under the organization and see their own activity, without access to team management or billing.
An Admin can promote a Member to Admin or demote an Admin back to Member from Team management; only a Primary Owner can hand off the Primary Owner role itself.
Licenses (seats)
A license is what actually allows someone to send a transfer under your organization - having a role doesn't matter if the account doesn't hold a license. Your plan sets how many licenses you have:
- Personal - always exactly 1 seat.
- Team - up to 15 seats.
- Enterprise - no fixed cap.
When you invite someone, they take up one of your available licenses immediately. If you're at your license limit, inviting another person is blocked with a prompt to add more seats or upgrade - licenses don't silently expand to cover a new invite.
Unlicensed and suspended members
Removing someone's license (rather than removing them from the organization entirely) leaves them as an unlicensed member - they keep their account and history but can't send new transfers until a license is assigned back to them. A suspended member is blocked outright, typically used for an account under review rather than one that's simply between licenses.
Managing licenses
An organization owner or admin manages seat count from Team management - adding seats increases your available licenses immediately; removing seats takes effect once enough members are unlicensed to free up the difference, so a paid seat is never dropped out from under someone who's actively using it.