Your plan
A plan governs allowance and volume. It does not govern permission: no feature is switched off by a plan, no autonomy setting comes from one, and no isolation boundary depends on one. The operator has no plan at all and no allowance gates, and runs the identical feature set — which is the clearest proof that capability and commerce are separate here.
The distinction, stated once#
| Question | Decided by | Not decided by |
|---|---|---|
| May Connect send email without asking? | Autonomy, at the narrowest matching scope | The plan |
| How many can it send today? | The plan's daily allowance | Autonomy |
| Can this workspace use the phone at all? | The feature set, which is the same for everybody | The plan |
| Can it see another workspace's data? | Isolation, enforced three times | The plan, which has no bearing on it |
| Who may change a setting? | The person's role in the workspace | The plan |
| What happens when the day's allowance is spent? | The allowance, which holds the send until it resets | Autonomy, which had already permitted it |
Reading that table in the other direction is the fastest way to work out which screen owns a problem. 'Nothing is being sent' is four questions, and only one of them is commercial — Connect is preparing work but sending nothing works through them in order.
What a plan actually carries#
- Daily allowances: how much outbound work the workspace may do in a day, counted against a ledger rather than estimated.
- A status: whether the entitlement is active, and what happens when it is not — which when a plan lapses covers.
- Requirements as well as limits: the free workspace requires a signature on outgoing mail, which is a plan-set obligation rather than a restriction on capability.
- Nothing about features. A new workspace is created with the whole feature set available, and no plan turns a capability off.
The operator has no plan#
The operator's workspace runs without an allowance ledger and without the gates a customer's plan applies. That is not a privileged tier of the product: it is the absence of a commercial relationship with itself. The same modules answer the same requests; nothing is unlocked.
It is worth knowing because it makes one class of report easy to diagnose. If something works for JBRH and stops for you at a certain volume, that is an allowance and the numbers are on Plan & Usage. If it stops immediately and completely, it is not an allowance, and the plan is the wrong place to look.
Where the boundary is easy to get backwards#
- 'Upgrade to enable this feature'
- Not how Connect works. There is no capability behind a plan, so an absent control is a defect or a routing gap rather than a purchase.
- 'The plan stopped it sending'
- Possible, but only as a volume limit for that day. A plan never refuses a specific recipient — that is suppression, unsubscribe or do-not-contact, which no plan changes.
- 'A bigger plan would let it act on its own'
- No. Autonomy is a setting a person makes, and the four modes are available to every workspace.
- 'A lapsed plan hides my data'
- It changes what the workspace may do, not what it holds. Records remain the workspace's, and isolation is unaffected in either direction.
The reason to keep this straight is diagnostic rather than philosophical. Every minute spent looking for a feature switch on a billing screen is a minute not spent reading the autonomy mode that is actually holding the work.
Questions#
Does a larger plan give me more of what Connect can do?
It gives you more volume, not more capability. Every workspace has the whole feature set from the moment it is created; what a plan sets is how much outbound work is allowed in a day and what the workspace's commercial status is.
What happens when the daily allowance runs out?
Prepared work waits rather than failing. An approved action holds until the allowance resets and then goes; the decision that authorised it is already recorded and does not need making again. See the allowance is spent.
Where do I see what I have used?
Plan & Usage, which reads the same ledger the enforcement reads. It is not a separate estimate — the number you see is the number a refusal would be based on. Usage and allowances covers how it is counted.