The questions of whoever has to sign

On our own servers, located in the European Union. There are no transfers outside the European Economic Area: not the hosting, not the backups, not the support and not the administration. Nothing is provided from outside the EEA, so there is no need for standard contractual clauses or the other Chapter V safeguards under the GDPR.

The part a British buyer needs to hear: the EEA is not the UK. The data sits in the European Union, not on British soil. If your policy says it has to stay in the UK, we do not do that today.

The database can only be reached from the server itself and is not exposed to the internet. The files you upload are stored on that server's disk, in a folder per company and under a generated name, and cannot be reached by direct address: every download checks the session and that you belong to your company again.

Every query to the database carries your company's identifier inside it: another organisation's data simply does not exist for your session. The check runs on the server, not on the screen, and the files are not public either: every download checks the session and the ownership again.

And we do not just say it. There is an automated test that plants a rival company in the same database, with its own content in every table, and then tries to reach it from the session of an employee at another company: posts, documents, survey answers, read receipts, event attendance and messages. If a single row leaks, the test fails. It runs against the real database, inside a transaction that is rolled back at the end.

The honest part: it is a shared database with separation by company, not an installation per client. If your tender requires a dedicated database or an installation in your own data centre, we do not do that today.

Yes. The Article 28 processor contract is part of the Terms of Service and is accepted when you sign up, with the specific obligations set out in the privacy policy. If your legal team needs it signed separately, we will provide it.

The current sub-processors are listed in the recipients section of the privacy policy, and any change is notified far enough in advance for you to object.

You are. The client company is the controller for the data it puts in about its own workforce: it decides what goes in, what for, who has access and how long it is kept. We act as processor and handle it on your instructions.

What we are controller for is the commercial relationship data: who signs, who administers the account, the billing and the web server logs.

No. Not for advertising, not for profiling, not for training automated systems, and it is not passed on to anyone. It is only accessed when that is unavoidable in order to provide support or resolve an incident, and those accesses are logged.

No. Not on your posts, not on the comments, not on the survey answers, not on the documents. No model is trained, nothing is passed to third parties, and there is no AI supplier with access to the content of your platform.

It turns up in every tender now, and the short answer is that there is nothing to negotiate here: the tool has no AI features, so it has nowhere to send your content in the first place.

No, neither one. It is on the roadmap, with no committed date.

What we do is answer security questionnaires in writing, in as much detail as you ask for. If your tender makes certification a pass/fail requirement, we cannot bid today, and we would rather say so in the first meeting.

Yes, over OpenID Connect, with Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace and Okta. It is the corporate identity module, at €0.02 per person per month, and SCIM 2.0 provisioning comes with it: when your HR system takes somebody on or off, the Blastack account is created or deactivated on its own.

There is no SAML, and that is a decision rather than something still on a list. SAML is signed XML, and verifying that signature properly requires XML canonicalisation, which is where most of the authentication bypasses of the last decade have come from. OpenID Connect is a signed token over a plain string: no canonicalisation, no ambiguity, and the three providers a company of this size actually has all speak it just as well. If your tender requires SAML 2.0, we do not meet it, and we would rather say so in the first meeting than in the second.

One thing worth keeping in mind about scope: in the companies Blastack is built for, most of the workforce has no account in the corporate directory at all. Single sign-on covers the office; the shop floor still comes in with a joining code on their own phone, which is what the product exists for.

No.

What there is: passwords are not stored, a scrypt derivative with a per-user salt is; the session identifier is stored encrypted, so a dump of the table does not let anyone impersonate anyone; there is a temporary lockout after eight failed attempts; the error message does not reveal whether the email address exists; and changing your password ends the open sessions on other devices.

No. The terms say it in those words: the service is provided with reasonable care and we aim to keep it continuously available, but no guaranteed figure is committed to today, because it is not measured and it is not compensated.

If your tender requires a service level agreement with service credits, we do not meet it today.

Yes, regular ones and within the same jurisdiction, as the terms set out. It is an infrastructure job, not a feature of the tool: if you need the procedure, the frequency and the restore time in writing, ask and we will give it to you.

The backups do not make us the keeper of your only copy, and they are no substitute for you taking your own information with you.

Not today. The service runs from our servers in the European Union. An installation in your data centre is not available.

As standard there is an audit log of the sensitive things: sign-ups, deactivations, role changes, invitations, approvals and rejections of posts, document uploads and deletions, read receipts and password changes, with a date and an author. Today that log is provided on request: there is still no screen that shows it and no export.

If you switch on the access and activity module, it also records which device and browser each person signs in from and which sections they visit, with a ninety-day retention and automatic deletion. If you do not switch it on, none of that is recorded. It is your decision, and it is exactly the point employee representatives tend to look at.

With invitation codes. An administrator generates a code that already carries the role, the department and the site inside it, with a maximum number of uses — up to five hundred per code — and an expiry date. Each person enters it on their phone and creates their own account.

For two thousand people the usual approach is one code per site or per department: people are sorted from day one, and nobody has to tidy up afterwards. The code goes on the changing-room noticeboard, gets read out at handover, or is printed alongside the payslip.

Up to five hundred per code, and you can generate as many codes as you need. Each one carries the role, the department and the site that whoever uses it will come in with, plus an expiry date.

For a workforce of two thousand that is four or five codes if you split them by site, not two thousand invitations. And because the code sorts the person at the moment they sign up, nobody has to tidy the list afterwards.

An administrator deactivates them from the people screen. They can no longer sign in, they stop appearing in the directory, and they stop counting on next month's invoice, because we charge for active people.

That is by hand unless you switch on the corporate identity module: with SCIM 2.0, somebody taken off in your HR system is deactivated here on their own. Without it, it is one at a time from the people screen — half an hour a month with a stable workforce, real work with heavy churn, which is why we say it before you sign and not after.

No. There is no bulk import of people from a file today.

It is the most uncomfortable limitation we have in front of a large company, and we say it first. Sign-ups are done with codes, and it works — precisely because it does not depend on IT having an up-to-date list — but if your requirement is to load a file with two thousand rows and have the accounts appear on their own, we do not do that today. It is on the roadmap, with no committed date.

No. Blastack sends no email of any kind: no invitations, no alerts, no digests. You hand out the sign-up code yourselves.

For people, yes. The corporate identity module speaks SCIM 2.0, so joiners and leavers come across from your HR system on their own: it is €0.02 per person per month, and the connector is configured at your end, in Entra ID, Workday or whatever you run. A leaver is deactivated, never deleted, so their posts and comments do not leave holes in the noticeboard.

What there is not is anything beyond identity — no payslips, no shifts — and there is still no import from a file. Without the module, sign-ups, leavers and department changes are done in Blastack by hand: half an hour a month with a stable workforce, real work with heavy churn.

The account is created in minutes and the first announcement can go out the same day. What takes time is not setting up the tool: it is handing out the codes and getting someone to publish consistently.

The rollout page has the realistic four-week timetable we recommend, with what each person has to do.

No. For someone who only reads, it is a wall of posts in their phone's browser: there is nothing to teach.

The people who publish and the people who administer do need a short session, around half an hour, to understand communities, targeting and the review queue.

The tool goes quiet on its own, and it is by far the most common way this goes wrong. It is not a product problem: the person who started publishing stops, and nobody picks it up.

What helps is small and simple: have two people with publishing rights rather than one, keep the review queue open so staff can propose content, and get someone to look at the reach analytics once a month, because a number going down shows up sooner than an empty noticeboard. What we do not do is turn up at your sites to keep it alive; there are competitors who do, and they include it in the price.

You set it up. There is no implementation project, no consultants, no setup fee and no on-site workshops.

If you are looking for a supplier who comes to your sites to keep the tool alive, there are competitors who do that and include it in the price. We do not.

Yes, and that is the reason it exists. The person enters a code and creates their account with their personal email address. They need no corporate account and nobody in IT has to set them up.

Blastack runs in a browser, so any company computer, tablet or phone you have on site will do. But if someone has none of those to hand at their workstation and does not want to use their own, we do not solve that: we do not sell touchscreens or shop-floor kiosks.

It is a conversation to have with your employee representatives, and the answer usually involves keeping the physical noticeboard for anything mandatory and using Blastack for everything else.

That is up to you, and it is worth reading in full before you take it to a works council. Browser notifications are built, but they do not come switched on: they need keys on the server and, on top of that, each person has to accept them on their own phone. Until they are switched on, nothing goes off: alerts appear inside the tool when somebody signs in.

We send no email to employees, and none is planned: the only email that leaves Blastack is the billing one. On iPhone, browser notifications only work with the app added to the home screen, on iOS 16.4 or later.

What there is NO way to do today is set quiet hours: if you switch them on, an announcement published at eleven at night goes off at eleven at night. If that matters to you — and in a works council it usually does — the honest answer is not to switch them on until it exists.

Three things are worth separating, because they always get mixed up in the meeting with the reps.

For posts, the figure that is shown is aggregate: what percentage of a department or of a site has seen an announcement. There is no screen with a list of who has seen which post.

For documents with read receipts, it is by name: the person presses a confirmation button and their name is stored with the date and time. That is the point of it, and it is what stands up in an HSE inspection.

And the access and activity module, which records which device each person signs in from and which sections they visit, is optional. If you do not switch it on, nothing is stored.

Yes, and it is built so that it stays that way even if someone goes looking. When a survey is marked anonymous, two things are split into two tables that cannot be joined: on one side the fact that you took part, with no timestamp; on the other the answers, with no link to a person. On top of that, the submission date is rounded to the day so it cannot be cross-referenced with the session logs, and no activity is recorded when you answer.

The trade is that you lose the breakdown by department, and we say so on the screen itself instead of pretending we have it.

What does hold is that each person votes once.

They can publish, and it is what keeps the tool alive six months in. What somebody without publishing rights writes does not go straight out: it goes into a review queue and a manager approves it or rejects it with a reason that reaches the author.

Prior approval can be switched off if you would rather everyone published directly. And approvals and rejections are logged with a date and an author, which is exactly what the reps ask about when the question is who decides what gets published and what does not.

That depends on your situation, and we are not the ones to tell you what your obligations are. It is the question we get asked most, so we have written a whole page about it. It is written for Spanish law, so the article numbers will not map onto the UK — here it is your recognised unions, your employee forum and whatever your own agreements say — but the five questions the reps actually ask are the same everywhere, and the honest answer to each one is sitting next to it.

Whoever signs pays, and there is one invoice. Blastack charges per active person across the whole organisation, without looking at which member each one belongs to: if the federation opens the account, the federation gets one invoice for the total, and how you split that between the member organisations is your call and your formula, outside the tool.

There is no billing per member organisation, no subscription each one pays on its own, and no way for a station to put its own card in. If what you need is for every house to get its own invoice in its own name, today that is thirty Blastack accounts and not one, with thirty contracts and thirty dashboards that cannot see each other.

And a pricing note worth having before you do the sums: co-operatives, associations, federations and clubs pay half for the first year. It is switched on by saying what you are when you sign up, with no statutes and no paperwork to send.

Yes, and that is exactly what the seat allocation is for. Every house —every station, every unit, every chapter— can carry a seat limit: Radio Pendle has two seats, Radio Wharfedale one. Whoever administers Pendle signs up to two people and, if they need a third, asks the federation, which is the one paying.

A house with no number has no limit, which is where everybody is until somebody decides to divide things up. And the limit does not apply to whoever administers the whole organisation: the federation can put a third person into a two-seat station whenever it likes, because it is their invoice. What the seat limit divides up is authority, not money.

Lowering the limit deactivates nobody. If Pendle has three people and you set its limit to two, all three stay in and the house sits over its limit until somebody leaves; the screen says so with the number, 3 of 2, so that nobody thinks they have deleted anyone.

Upwards, yes: whoever administers the whole organisation sees everything, including what a single member organisation publishes for its own people. There is no private wall in front of whoever pays the bill, and we would rather say it that plainly before you sign, because it is the first thing a member organisation asks and the last thing it finds out.

Downwards, no. A member organisation's administrator has their authority cut back to their own house: another station's list of people does not appear for them, nor its joining codes, nor its access log, nor who belongs to its communities. And it is not that it is hidden on the screen: the cut goes inside the query to the database, so there is no address to type and no screen to slip in through. There is an automated test that tries precisely that and fails if a single row gets out.

What everybody does see is what is addressed to them: the circular the federation sends to the thirty stations reaches all thirty. And one precision about what gets measured, because it tends to be taken for granted and it is not exact: the read percentage is broken down by division —committee, section, programme— and not by house. If you want the number station by station, each station has to be a division as well, and that means having divisions switched on: the federation preset has them off out of the box, because it assumes the committees sit at head office. They are switched on from administration whenever you like, and switching them off deletes nothing.

Structurally yes, and that is why they count on the invoice: they are a person on the roll, paid by you or not. A member of a farming co-operative who brings in a harvest and never sees a payslip takes up the same seat as an administrator in the office.

On the screen, no. The word the product uses to address people is picked when you sign up and can be changed afterwards: members, volunteers, professionals or contributors instead of employees. Same with the houses —branches, head offices, units, stores— and with the divisions, which in a co-operative are sections and in a professional body, committees. It is not decoration: calling somebody an employee on the first screen when they are not on your payroll tells them the tool was built for somebody else.

What does not change is the permissions. A member comes in with the role of somebody who only reads and comments, the same as an employee; being a member of the co-operative gives them no access to administration, to the billing or to the list of people.

Head office sees everything inside the account, because the account is theirs: the units, their people, what gets published in each one, the read percentage of each announcement, and the access log. That percentage comes broken down by division, not unit by unit: to have it unit by unit, each unit has to be a division as well. If your network needs head office not to be able to see a franchisee's staff, that is not solved with permissions inside one account: it is solved with one account per franchisee, and then it is forty contracts.

What does get cut back is the other direction, and it is usually the one you actually need: every unit has its own administrator, who signs up their own team, publishes for them and neither sees nor manages the people in the other units. That way the franchisee keeps control of their contracts and their data in front of the other franchisees, which is who they really compete with.

And the part that makes this worth doing: head office's announcement reaches the team on the floor, not the owner's inbox. Between head office and the counter there stops being a person deciding what counts and when.

The ones anybody who only reads has: they open the circular, comment on it if comments are open, confirm they have received a document when they are asked to, and see the directory if you have it switched on. None from administration. That they pay a subscription rather than draw a salary changes nothing in the tool.

Chapters can run their own house: each one with its own home page, its own colour and its own administrator, who sees and manages theirs and nobody else's. Committees —conduct, education, early careers— are set up as divisions of their own rather than as departments, and each one has its own people without noise for the rest.

On the wording, precisely, because we get asked every time: chapter is in the catalogue and is the word the tool labels each house with, and committee is in the divisions one. The one that is not there is registrant, for the people: what the catalogue offers you there is professional and member, and those are what is left. Each chapter's own name comes out exactly as you wrote it, in the menus and in the notifications.

On the invoice, yes, and this is the answer to have before you do the sums: we charge per person on the roll, and a volunteer is a person on the roll. There is no volunteer rate and no free seats, so a charity with thirty staff and two hundred volunteers pays for two hundred and thirty.

In the tool, no. Volunteers and paid staff are split by division, each getting what is theirs: the staff handbook does not reach the person who helps out on Saturdays, and the distribution rota does not reach the support worker. Every site or project also carries its own home page and its own coordinator, who only sees theirs.

What does need to reach both is what you have to be able to evidence —data protection, the safeguarding policy, health and safety— and that is what read receipts are for: it is recorded who confirmed and when, including the people who help without a contract.

Yes, and it is the first thing you are asked when the account is created: what you are. Depending on what you answer, the tool comes with your wording already in place —stations or branches instead of sites, members instead of employees, sections or committees instead of departments— and with two or three divisions seeded that look like yours instead of Management, Finance and Operations. All of it can be changed afterwards from administration, entry by entry, without losing anything.

The honest part about the limit: the words come out of a closed catalogue, they are not typed in free. It is longer than people expect —for the houses there are station, branch, chapter, head office, unit, club, jobsite, plant, warehouse, store, hotel, restaurant, workshop, depot, branch office, pharmacy, clinic and care home; for the divisions, section, committee, area, team, shift and trade; for the people, partner, associate, co-op member, member, volunteer, contributor, professional, franchisee, worker and employee— and even so one that gets asked for is missing: registrant, for example, is not there, and the nearest are professional and member. The catalogue is closed because the word inflects: the interface runs in twelve languages, and a word typed in free comes out declined wrongly in Polish and Czech in front of thirty customers on day one.

Each house's own name has no such problem: Radio Pendle, the Windermere hotel or the Yorkshire chapter come out exactly as you wrote them, in the menus, in the columns and in the notifications.

Its house is archived and its people are deactivated. They stop being able to sign in, they stop appearing in the directory and they stop counting on next month's invoice, because the charge is per active person. An archived house takes nobody new, and its administrator is left with no authority rather than inheriting the whole organisation's, which is the slip that would turn one station's administrator into the head of the federation.

What stays is what was published: those people's posts and comments stay where they were. Deleting them would leave the noticeboard with holes where messages used to be, and a thread cut in half is worse than the name of somebody who has gone.

What there is no way to do is take that member organisation into an account of its own with its content inside. If a station leaves and wants to carry on with Blastack by itself, it starts from scratch: it opens its own account and its people sign up again with a code.

No. It runs in the phone's browser and gets added to the home screen: from then on it opens full screen and is used like any other app, without going through a store or taking up space.

The honest trade-off: no signal, no service. And browser notifications have to be switched on with keys on the server and accepted phone by phone; on iPhone they also need the app pinned to the home screen, on iOS 16.4 or later.

No. It opens in the browser, so you need mobile data or wi-fi at the point where you are reading it. There is no offline mode and no pre-download of announcements: in a dead zone there is nothing to read until the signal comes back.

In practice it sorts itself out, because people look at it in the changing room, on a break or before going onto the line, which is where the signal usually is. But if your case is a shielded unit or a basement where people spend the whole shift, that is a real limitation and it is worth measuring the coverage before you sign.

It is internal communications software, and it does the part of a corporate intranet that is any use to a workforce without a desk: the announcements board, communities by site, the people directory, events and the documents that have to be read. For a lot of people on a line or in a shop it is the first intranet they have ever had access to, because the old ones sat behind a corporate account they never had.

What it is not: it is not a document management system with versioning and approval flows, it has no free-form pages or layouts, it pulls no content from SharePoint or Google Workspace, and there is no custom domain. Single sign-on there is — OpenID Connect, as a separate module — but if what you want is to replace a full office intranet, this still falls short, and it is better to know now.

In four specific ways. You know what percentage of the workforce has read each announcement, and which department is being left out. There are roles and a review queue, so an official announcement does not get mixed in with the weekend videos. The company's data sits in a company account, not on the personal phone of a supervisor who leaves tomorrow. And there is a record of who published and who approved what.

There is also a difference in WhatsApp's favour, and it is a big one: WhatsApp makes a noise out of the box, on everybody's phone. Our browser notifications have to be switched on at the server and accepted phone by phone, they have no quiet hours, and nothing arrives by email. For an urgent alert that has to go off at three in the morning, the sensible thing is still to keep both channels: the group for what has to make a noise, Blastack for what has to be on the record.

Yes, as a separate module at €0.10 per person per month. Private conversations and groups, with attachments and video up to 20 MB, inside the tool and under your account.

It is the most expensive of the ten modules because it is the only one used every day and by everybody. And you can leave it off: if you would rather people carried on talking where they already talk, the noticeboard works just the same without it.

Yes. The interface is written in twelve languages — English, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Swedish, Dutch, Polish, Romanian and Czech — and each person picks their own and sees the whole app in it; it does not have to be the same as everyone else's. Posts can be written in those same twelve, and everyone reads the version in their own language.

What there is not is machine translation. If an announcement has to go out in three languages, whoever publishes it writes it in three languages — nothing translates it for them. On a shop floor where people work in Polish, Romanian and Lithuanian that is a real gap, and it is the one that matters: menus in the right language are no help if the announcement is in a language you do not read.

There is no automatic recovery today. Because we send no emails, there is no forgotten-password link, and an administrator cannot reset somebody else's from the tool either: you have to write to us to sort it out.

It is first on the list of things to fix, and we say it here because in a workforce of two thousand it is going to happen in the first week.

There is no audit and no conformance statement, so we cannot sign off that it meets the standard.

What there is: the interface is labelled for screen readers, it can be navigated by keyboard, and the contrast of text against your company colour is calculated so that it stays readable. If you need a formal accessibility statement, we do not have one today.

Not with a ready-made connector for any of the three. Nothing reads from or writes into Teams, SharePoint or Google Drive. There is a public programming interface, with an OpenAPI spec and signed outgoing events, so somebody on your side can publish into Blastack from your own systems. Off the shelf there is nothing.

Identity is the exception, and it is a real one: sign-in over OpenID Connect with Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace or Okta, and SCIM 2.0 provisioning from your HR system. That is the corporate identity module, at €0.02 per person per month.

No. There are folders and read receipts with a date and time, which is what saves an audit. Folders today are visible to the whole workforce: they cannot be limited to one department or one site. There is no version control, no document approval flows and no electronic signature.

Blastack's place is the document your workforce has to read, not the company's master archive.

Eight megabytes per image, twenty per document and fifty per post attachment, video included. There is no total storage quota per company.

Files are checked by their binary signature and not by their extension, so an executable renamed to .jpg does not get in.

For what most companies ask an internal communications tool to do — get the announcement to the people on the line, in the shop and out on the road, and know how many of them read it — yes. For a multinational with staff in five languages, a SAML requirement and a tender that demands certifications, no: they win there, and we say so on our own comparison pages.

Workplace shut down for good on 31 May 2026, and we have no importer for whatever you took out of it. Against Steeple, the big difference is that they put touchscreens on the shop floor and turn up in person, and we do neither. Against Beekeeper — now part of LumApps — they have HR system integrations and a native app with push notifications, and we have neither.

There is a page per competitor with the table row by row and a column saying who wins each one. In every one of them Blastack loses more rows than it wins, and they are written that way on purpose: nobody believes a comparison where the person writing it always wins.

Yes. You upload your logo and choose your company colour, and they replace ours across the whole platform, including the icon that ends up on the phone's home screen. Each person can also choose their own interface colour.

What there is not today is a custom domain: the platform lives at our address, with your branding inside it.

€1.00 per employee per month, before VAT. That covers two things and only two: the noticeboard with its review queue, and the directory.

Everything else is ten modules that are switched on separately, and together they add €0.28 per person per month: internal chat (€0.10), communities and sections (€0.04), documents (€0.03), events (€0.02), surveys (€0.02), analytics (€0.02), corporate identity (€0.02), channels (€0.01), recognition (€0.01) and access and activity (€0.01). With all ten on it is €1.28 per employee per month.

It is billed on the people active each month: if somebody leaves, they stop counting. There is no implementation fee, no training fee and no hardware to buy.

Because the base rate has come down from €1.50 to €1.00, and in exchange two things that used to be inside it have come out: communities and sections, and events. They are modules now, at four cents and two cents.

The reason is that not everybody uses them. A single-site company gets along perfectly well with the noticeboard, and was paying inside the base rate for per-site spaces it did not need. Anyone who does want them switches them on: the base rate with communities comes to €1.04, instead of the €1.50 it was before.

The same thing happens at the other end. A company that wants absolutely everything pays €1.28 per person per month, when under the old pricing that same full package was €2.25. There is no small print in the change: the base rate goes down, two features come out of it, and the total goes down in both cases.

Five hundred people is €500 a month before VAT, or €6,000 a year paying monthly. Two thousand people is €2,000 a month, €24,000 a year.

With the ten modules switched on the price per person goes up to €1.28: €640 a month for five hundred — €7,680 a year — and €2,560 a month for two thousand, €30,720 a year.

Paying the year up front you are charged for ten months instead of twelve: €5,000 for five hundred people on the base rate alone and €6,400 with everything; €20,000 for two thousand on the base rate alone and €25,600 with everything.

The price per person is the same for thirty as for three thousand: no tiers, no published volume discount and no joining fee. It is billed on the people active each month, so the figure comes down on its own when somebody leaves. If your numbers are very large, talk to us before you sign instead of assuming.

Yes: the annual cycle is twelve months at the price of ten. A workforce of a hundred on the base rate alone pays €1,200 a year paying monthly, or €1,000 paying the year up front; with the ten modules, €1,536 monthly or €1,280 up front. A company of four hundred with everything switched on is €6,144 monthly or €5,120 paying for the year.

It is not a launch promotion and it is not a discount for signing more years: it is the price of the cycle, and it is published the same way the monthly one is. The two months are what you save by being charged once and in advance, which is admin work that does not have to be done twelve times.

The monthly cycle still exists and still has no minimum term. The annual one is an option, not a condition for getting the good price.

It is pro-rated by the day and settled on the next invoice. If you have paid for the year and you switch chat on on 14 March, you are charged for the part of the cycle that is left, counted in days rather than in months: the days remaining over the days in the whole cycle. It is the calculation nobody can argue with, which is why it is done that way.

Switching something off mid-cycle works the same way in reverse, with one important difference: it creates a credit against the next invoice, not a refund. No money is transferred back, because that would mean amending an invoice that has already been issued.

The same rule applies to headcount. If new people come in, you are charged for the part of the year remaining for each extra person. If headcount falls, nothing is credited during the cycle: it is counted again at renewal, which is when it is adjusted. On the monthly cycle there is no pro-rating at all, because each month is billed with whatever is active when it is issued.

Yes, and it is one of the cases that works best. Thirty people is €30 a month on the base rate, or €38.40 with the ten modules switched on. Over a year that is €360 and €460.80 paying monthly, or €300 and €384 paying the year up front.

There is no minimum headcount, no minimum monthly fee and no implementation cost, so a workshop, a restaurant or a small care home pays for what it is and not for a minimum designed for somebody else's company.

It is a concrete difference from the tools that require a monthly minimum: Steeple, for example, mentions a €200 a month minimum below a hundred people on its own website. With a floor like that, the company of thirty pays almost the same as the company of a hundred.

No. The monthly contract renews until you end it: no minimum term and no cancellation penalty, exactly as it is written in the terms. There is no compulsory annual contract, which is the norm in this sector.

There is an annual cycle, and it comes out cheaper — twelve months at the price of ten, paid up front — but it is an option you choose. If you take it, what you are buying is a year: during that year, headcount that falls is not credited, it is settled at renewal.

The invoice is calculated and issued from the platform itself, with its series and its number, and you can see the current month's amount at any time. Payment is agreed with us, by bank transfer or Direct Debit.

On the monthly cycle, each closed month is billed with whatever was active. On the annual cycle, the ten months of the whole year are charged up front, and anything that changes along the way is settled pro rata on the next invoice.

There is no card payment gateway inside the tool, which is also why the 15-day trial does not ask for a card and cannot charge you on its own.

It carries the series, the financial year and a sequential number, the period billed, the number of active employees it was calculated on, the net amount, the VAT line and a line-by-line breakdown: the base rate on one line and each module switched on separately. Any settlements from an annual cycle go on their own line too, with the days charged or credited.

The invoice is issued from Spain and in euros, so the VAT line is Spanish VAT, 21% where it applies. How that lands for a company registered outside Spain depends on your own VAT position, so check it with your accountant before you sign rather than after. We will not guess it for you.

The current month's amount can be checked at any time from the billing screen, using the same function that later issues the invoice. There are no surprises at the end of the month because it is literally the same calculation.

Nothing automatic. Because we do not ask for a card to start, nothing is charged on its own. If you want to carry on, you move onto the paid service; if not, the account is closed and the data is deleted.

The information is yours, and it is written that way in the terms. When the contract ends you have thirty calendar days of access to get it back. After that, the data and the files are permanently deleted within a maximum of thirty further days, backups included, with the sole exception of what has to be kept by law, which is limited to the billing records.

The uncomfortable part: there is no export-everything button today. Documents and files are downloaded from the tool itself, and if you need a full dump of posts, people and answers you have to ask for it. Export in a single file is on the roadmap, with no committed date.

Yes, and it is what we recommend. One plant or one branch, two announcements and fifteen days. At the end you have a real read percentage from your own people, which is a much better argument in a board meeting than anything we can tell you.

Say so before you sign. We are a small team and that cuts both ways: we are not going to have a module ready in March that you ask for in February, but you will talk directly to the person who writes the product and you will know exactly where it stands.