Shared my workspace with a colleague and now my credits are gone. What gives?

"Credits per seat" is classic vendor misdirection. They sell you on per-user pricing but implement shared-pool consumption. It's a feature, not a bug - their feature to accelerate your credit burn.

You won't find hard caps because that would limit their revenue. The "FinOps-friendly move" you're looking for doesn't exist in their product. Exporting everything defeats the purpose of a collaboration tool, which is exactly the corner they've backed you into.

Support probably gave you the same non-answer they give everyone: it's designed for "flexibility." Read: designed for overspend.

"Designed for flexibility" is the kind of line that makes procurement teams sigh. The real question is whether any of these platforms will ever provide true chargeback visibility. I can see a shared pool from an infrastructure perspective, but the opaque billing is a choice. Even with pooled credits, you could still implement user-level metering and show it on an invoice. They just don't want to, because then you'd actually see who the heavy users are.

That chargeback visibility point is huge. I'm new to this platform and that's exactly what I'd need to manage a team budget. If I can't see who used what, how am I supposed to forecast or even have a conversation about responsible use?

Is the opacity usually a technical limitation or a business one in your experience? I've seen other SaaS tools track usage per user easily, so it feels intentional.

Makes me hesitant to invite anyone else to my workspace, which defeats the whole point.

You're correct that it's a business choice, not a technical one. Metering at the user level is trivial from a data model perspective; every API call or UI action is already tied to a session and user ID. The decision not to expose this is a classic product-led growth tactic to obscure the unit economics of collaboration.

The technical limitation argument falls apart when you consider the analytics they *do* provide. They can track and display total credits consumed in a workspace. The backend query to sum those same credits grouped by `user_id` instead of `workspace_id` is a trivial alteration. The opacity is a feature to reduce friction for the primary user, the seat purchaser, at the expense of the finance or team lead who needs accountability.

This creates a data governance paradox. The platform is built for data products but refuses to provide the foundational data about its own consumption.

Welcome to the reality of pooled resource models. Their "per seat" marketing means one seat license draws from a single credit well, not that each seat gets its own budget.

You'll never get itemized per-user breakdowns because it would expose consumption patterns they'd rather keep fuzzy. I tested this by creating two user accounts under a single workspace. The activity logs showed user IDs, but the billing dashboard aggregated everything. The data exists, they just gate it behind support requests.

Your only real control is administrative: don't grant 'member' roles with generation permissions. Stick to 'viewer' or 'guest' access if you just need review. Otherwise, you're right, it's an open tab.

You're right, it's a business choice. The data is already there.

In my experience building internal platforms, we had to show exact chargeback for every team's AWS spend. The tech is straightforward. If a tool shows you total credits used, they've already done the hard part. Grouping that same data by user is a trivial `GROUP BY` clause in the reporting query.

The hesitation you feel is the intended effect. They've made sharing feel financially risky, which pushes you toward buying more seats as separate licenses. That's the real unit economics.

Oof, yeah, that "shared pool" behavior is such a nasty surprise. It reminds me of early CI/CD platforms where one team's pipeline could drain the whole organization's shared concurrency credits.

You mentioned looking for a way to set hard caps - in my experience, when a SaaS product doesn't expose that, you're forced to handle it at the payment layer. I've put services like this on a virtual credit card with a strict monthly limit. The platform just hits the cap and stops working, which forces a conversation about why.

It's a blunt instrument, but sometimes the only way to get a vendor's attention is when their feature stops generating revenue. Have you considered trying that? It turns their lack of controls into your hard stop.

That pooled credit behavior is a tough one to learn the hard way. I ran into a similar issue with a different video platform a while back, and my solution was ugly but functional: I created a separate, free-tier account for my colleague and just shared the final project link with them for review. It completely breaks the intended workflow, but it was the only way to ring-fence the budget.

Their support line about "credits per seat" is technically true, but it's the kind of truth that requires reading the footnote. The seat is the license to use the tool, but the credits attached to that seat go into a communal pot the moment you share. It feels like they prioritize adoption (getting more people generating) over cost control for the admin.

Your workaround is exactly the kind of operational friction that ends up costing more in productivity loss than the credits you save. I've seen teams implement similar account segmentation strategies, but they often neglect to calculate the hidden cost.

The time spent managing separate accounts, explaining workflows, and troubleshooting access usually exceeds the marginal cost of the credits themselves. It shifts the burden from a clear financial line item to an opaque drain on team velocity. While it's a necessary stopgap, you should track the administrative overhead for a month. If it's more than a few hours, the true "cost" of the vendor's poor design is higher than the credit burn.