The self-service plans are tiered by the number of developer seats (Starter up to 5, Team up to 10, Business up to 25). For teams with more than 25 developers there is the Enterprise plan without a seat cap — contact us. Every CodeCharter account belongs to an organization, and a plan's seat limit applies to that organization's members: this page defines precisely who counts toward it.
What is a seat
Every organization member counts as a seat, with one exception: a member who only holds billing permissions (invoices, payment method, plan changes, cancellation — nothing else) does not consume a seat. Every other role does, including a read-only reviewer: rule and profile access, running specs, authoring draft rules, publishing, and managing the organization are all seat-bearing roles.
This is enforced technically, not by a promise in the terms and conditions: an invitation to join your organization can be sent freely, but it cannot be accepted once your organization is already at its plan's seat limit — the invited person sees that the organization is full until you free up a seat or upgrade.
What is not a seat
- A billing-only member. If you add a dedicated member who only manages invoices, payment method, and plan changes, that membership does not consume a seat.
- CI service accounts. The API key your GitHub Action, GitLab pipeline, Azure pipeline, or similar uses to run CodeCharter is not an organization member and not a seat. This holds even if you use multiple service accounts per stage for purely technical reasons.
- People outside your organization. An external contractor who opens a one-off pull request without ever being invited into your organization does not consume a seat.
What happens if you exceed the threshold?
New members simply cannot join once your organization is at the seat limit for its current plan — the invitations page shows a warning and a link to upgrade. A member with billing permissions switches to the next tier on the organization's billing page; Stripe prorates the difference for the remainder of the period. If your team shrinks, you can downgrade the same way, down to (but not below) your organization's current member count; the downgrade takes effect at the end of the current billing period and is not prorated. More at Plan overview and Cancellation and plan change.
If you are unsure which tier fits your team, feel free to write to us at support@codecharter.tools. We will review it together and suggest the appropriate plan.
Rolling out CodeCharter to your team
Invite your teammates as members of your organization from
Settings → Members (/orgs/{your-org}/settings/members) or
Settings → Invitations. Assign each person a role appropriate to what
they need to do — reading rules and findings, authoring and running specs,
publishing rules and profiles, or managing the organization itself. Once
someone accepts an invitation, they sign in with their own portal account
and authenticate the CLI with codecharter login — see
Browser sign-in — or use a downloaded license file,
see License file. For CI, create an API key from
your organization and store it as a pipeline secret
(CODECHARTER_API_KEY) — see
API keys in secrets.
Privacy
CodeCharter does not track your usage to determine seat counts — anonymous telemetry is strictly opt-in (see Telemetry). By default the CLI sends nothing back, and your source code and findings never leave your machine; in CI the CLI contacts the portal only to fetch its short-lived license. The VS Code extension sends no usage data either. Seat counts come purely from organization membership, not from watching what you do with CodeCharter.