Your plan gives you two separate seat pools rather than one shared count: paid seats for people who do the work, and free viewer seats for people who only need to look. Knowing which pool a person belongs to tells you whether adding them costs anything.
Paid seats
Owners, Admins, and Editors each take a paid seat. Every plan includes a fixed number, and paid plans let you buy more. Suspended members hold no seat.
Free viewer seats
Viewers take a free viewer seat instead. A Viewer can read your content and see analytics in the admin app, but cannot edit or publish, and has no access to the inbox or contacts. That makes the Viewer role a good fit for stakeholders who want visibility without a paid seat: leadership, sales, or a client reviewing progress.
Viewer seats are capped per plan too, and the cap is not raised by seat add-ons; upgrading is the way to get more.
Where to see both pools
- Settings > Members shows a seat indicator next to Invite Member and warns when either pool is full.
- Settings > Billing shows a usage gauge for each pool against your plan's limits, and the per-plan numbers are listed in Seats: buy add-ons & understand the limits.
Changing roles across the boundary
Moving someone between a paid role and Viewer moves them between pools. The Change role modal shows the consequence before you confirm: promoting a Viewer uses a paid seat, and demoting to Viewer frees one. If the destination pool is full, that option is disabled with the reason. Moves within the same pool (for example, Editor to Admin) change nothing.