Studio seats & roles

Your pod licence is not just one person's key. It is your studio: a named set of people, each in a seat, each seeing exactly as much as their job needs.

One licence, one studio

The licence key you pasted into pod on day one is your studio on the hub: an organisation with your name on it, your people in it, and your client accounts under it. There is nothing extra to buy, sign up for, or connect. If you have a key, you have a studio; the first person in it is you, as its owner.

Everything else in this section hangs off that one idea. The studio is the boundary: your episodes, your projects, your clients and your record of decisions all live inside it, and nothing crosses out of it.

Two pools of seats

A studio comes with two separate seat pools, and keeping them separate is the point. Your editor and your customer are not the same kind of person, and they should not compete for the same chair.

The owner's hub for Meridian Pictures. A Team and seats card reads 'Studio seats 3 of 5 · client seats 2 of 2' and lists Asha (owner, marked YOU), Ravi (operator), Devika (reviewer) and Priya of Chai and Co (client), each with a disable control, plus arjun@chaico.example marked PENDING, and an invite form with email, name and a role dropdown. Below it, Pending your approval holds one submitted cut with Watch, Publish to client and Reject buttons. Below that, Projects lists General and Chai Serial with their members and a can-publish checkbox. — The owner's whole hub is this one stack of cards. Top: who is in the studio and how many chairs are left. The seat line counts the pending invite: *client seats 2 of 2*, with one of the two still unaccepted.

The default allocation: five studio seats and two client seats. Plans vary: a bigger studio buys a bigger pool of each, and the two are counted separately, so onboarding a sixth customer never costs you an editor's chair.

Studio seats are your people: you and whoever you employ. Client seats are the customers you're making films for, one seat per account, held by the person on their side who signs off on cuts. Five and two are the defaults; your plan sets the actual numbers.

Seats are counted when someone is invited and when a disabled person is switched back on, never in the middle of somebody's working day. An invite you've sent but nobody has accepted holds its seat, which is why a studio with one live customer and one pending invitation reads "2 of 2". If you free up a seat by disabling a leaver, the seat is available immediately; nobody who is already logged in and working gets thrown out because a count changed underneath them.

Signup is invite-only

There is no "create an account" page anywhere in this system, for anybody. The owner types an email address, a name and a role, and presses Invite. That mints a one-time link, good for a week, on which that person sets their own password. That's the only door.

This is deliberate and it is not a temporary limitation. A studio's client portal is not a place where strangers should be able to make themselves an account and start looking around. Every single person in your studio, employee or customer, is there because you typed their email address and pressed invite.

Pod does not email the invite. You send it. The link appears on your screen and it is yours to pass on, in whatever chat or mail you already use with that person. There is no mail in this system at all, and no notifications: not for invites, not for cuts, not for anything. That is a deliberate limit rather than a gap. It also means the invite is only as private as the way you send it, so send it the way you'd send a door key.

There is no password reset, on purpose. Nobody can request a reset link, because there is nothing here to send one with. When somebody loses their password, the owner invites them again and they set a new one. Never go looking for a "forgot password" link; it doesn't exist, and the sign-in page says so.

The review link is not a back door into this. When you publish a cut, your customer gets a link they can open without a password, but it is minted only for a client seat that already exists and is already on that project, it creates no account, and it opens one cut and nothing else. Nobody gets into your studio by holding a URL; they get to watch the film you sent them. See rework & the notes loop.

The four roles

owner: you

The studio's manager and administrator. The owner invites people, creates projects, decides who works on which client account, and holds the final say on what reaches a customer. There is exactly one thing an owner can't do: pretend they didn't approve something (see the decision record).

There is no separate "manager" role, on purpose. In a five-person studio, a permission tier between the owner and the editors is ceremony. It adds an org chart nobody asked for and a second place for approvals to get stuck. The owner is the manager. If you need to spread the approval load, that's what a per-project publishing grant does, and it's covered on projects & client access.

operator and reviewer: your crew

The studio seats that do the work. They push episodes up from their own machines, submit cuts for client review, read the client's notes, and iterate. They see every episode and every project in the studio, not just the ones they're assigned to.

The two labels carry the same permissions. The distinction exists so your seat list reads like your actual team (the person who runs productions and the person who only ever looks at cuts shouldn't be described by the same word), and so that if a real permission split is ever needed, it has a place to land. Today, treat them as one seat class with two names.

client: your customer

A guest in your studio, not a quiet member of it. A client seat sees only the projects it's a member of, and inside those, only the cuts you explicitly put in front of it. It never sees drafts, alternative takes, character sheets, shot prompts, other customers' work, or the list of people who work for you.

It is also the only kind of seat that can be reached by a review link, the no-password link to one surfaced cut that publishing produces, which is how most customers will actually watch and sign off. The seat and its password still exist and still matter: they are what the portal opens with, where every cut and every note live together. The link is a shortcut to one of them, aimed at the person who reads it on a phone between meetings.

Who sees what

	owner	operator / reviewer	client
Every episode in the studio	Yes	Yes	No
Cuts surfaced to them	Yes	Yes	Yes, in their projects only
Drafts, takes, sheets, shot prompts	Yes	Yes	Never
Other clients' projects	Yes	Yes	Never
The studio's list of people	Yes	No	Never
Invite people, manage seats	Yes	No	No
Create projects, assign members	Yes	No	No
Push an episode from the terminal	Yes	Yes	No
Submit a cut for review	Yes	Yes	No
Approve someone else's submission	Yes	No	No
Publish straight to a client	Yes	Only with a publishing grant on that project, and only their own cuts	No
Approve or reject a cut as the customer	No	No	Yes
Hand a client the review link for a cut	Yes	Yes	No
Answer a cut from that link, without signing in	No	No	Yes, one cut per link
Comment on an episode	Yes	Yes	Yes, on surfaced work

Why your own crew sees everything

The row above that surprises people is the first one: an operator sees every project, including the ones they aren't assigned to. That's a decision, not an oversight.

In a five-person studio, hiding work from your own editor produces friction, not safety. It produces the Tuesday afternoon where the one person who knows how the client likes their titles can't open the episode, the owner is on a plane, and a delivery slips over a permission checkbox. The people who share your payroll share your work.

The boundary that genuinely matters runs somewhere else entirely: between your studio and your customers. That one is enforced hard, in the system itself and not just in the layout of a page, and it's what the next page is about.

Note: If you need real separation between two internal teams (separate books, separate people, no shared visibility), that's two studios, which is to say two licences. One licence is one studio, and inside a studio, colleagues are colleagues.

Next: projects & client access: how one client engagement becomes a scope.

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