Plans and Billing

Sway has four plans: Basic, Starter, Studio and Roster. Basic is the state of every page that has never subscribed, and it is a working product, not a trial. You can create pages, publish events, sell tickets and send email marketing on Basic. What the paid plans buy you is a handful of extra screens and larger allowances on the ones you already have.

A plan belongs to a page or to a crew. It never belongs to you. Two people sharing a promoter page share its plan; one person owning four pages pays for each one separately unless those pages sit in a crew.

The four are compared side by side, with prices, on the public pricing page. Inside the admin the same comparison appears on the plan panel, and that is the one to buy from: it already knows which page you are subscribing.

See which plan a page is on

1. Open Manage, then click your artist, venue or promoter page.
2. Click Subscription in the left rail. The heading reads Subscription, with Manage your page's subscription plan and billing underneath.
3. Read the badge next to Current Plan. A grey Basic badge over Free plan with essential features means the page has never subscribed. A coloured Starter badge means it has. A page inside a crew reads Current Plan (via Crew) instead and names the crew's plan.

Reading the screen and acting on it are separate rights. Anyone who can open Subscription can read it. The buttons belong to the page owner and to members holding the subscription-management permission, and for everyone else the cards carrying them are not drawn at all. On Basic that leaves the Current Plan card alone, with no Subscribe to Starter and no Upgrade to Studio below it; on Starter it leaves Current Plan and Billing Status, with no cycle switch, no pause box, no Cancel Subscription and no Manage Billing. A screen that looks like a read-only summary is telling you about your permissions, not about the plan.

Subscribe a page to Starter

1. Open Manage, then the artist, venue or promoter page.
2. Click Subscription in the left rail.
3. Pick a billing cycle in the picker. Annual is billed once and carries two months free.
4. Click Subscribe to Starter. The checkout opens on Subscribe to Starter, with 7-day free trial under the price.
5. If the page was not carried through, choose it under Select which page to subscribe: and click Continue to checkout. Pages already inside a crew, and pages already on Starter, are not listed.
6. Pay. You land back in the admin and the screen switches to its Starter shape.

Switch billing cycle

1. Open Subscription.
2. Click Switch to Annual or Switch to Monthly. A confirmation opens.
3. Read the amount. Moving to annual charges a prorated amount immediately; moving to monthly changes nothing until the current annual period ends.
4. Confirm.

If a cycle switch is already booked, a banner reads Your billing will switch to … on … with Cancel scheduled switch under it, and the switch buttons disappear until you cancel it.

Pause instead of cancelling

1. Open Subscription.
2. Type a number of days in the small box. The button next to it shows how many days of pause you have left this year.
3. Click Pause.

While paused, the plan badge gains a Paused pill and the card warns that Features are temporarily reduced to Basic level during the pause. Click Resume to end it early.

Cancel, and undo a cancellation

1. Open Subscription.
2. Click Cancel Subscription. The dialog reads Are you sure you want to cancel? Features remain active until the end of the current billing period.
3. Click Confirm Cancel, or Keep Subscription to back out.

The subscription then runs to the end of the paid period, and Cancels at period end appears next to the status badge. Until that date, Undo Cancellation puts it back with no gap and no new charge.

Where a plan lives

Studio is the entry level for a crew. There is no Starter for a crew, and no Studio for a single page: a page reaches Studio by joining a crew that holds one. Crews themselves are covered in Crews.

What a plan unlocks

Two different things are gated, and they behave differently on screen.

Screens the plan opens or closes

CRM and API are locked in the rail: the row is greyed and cannot be clicked. Notifications is not. Its row stays clickable on Basic and the screen opens, but instead of the composer it shows the plan panel described below. The URL tab behaves like a rail row: greyed, with a sparkle, inside Settings.

There is no CRM row on the artist and venue rails at all. Its absence there is not a plan lock, and no plan adds it.

Allowances that grow with the plan

These are not on or off. Every plan has some, and the number rises as you move up.

• Storage per page, shown as a bar on the Subscription screen.
• Team members per page, shown on Permissions as a used-over-limit figure.
• Email marketing, which works on every plan including Basic. Only the contact and send allowances change. See Email.
• Push notifications, which start at Starter. Basic has none, which is why the screen shows the plan panel rather than the composer. See Push notifications.
• Presskits, on artist pages. Every plan can create at least one. The plan sets how many, how many assets each may hold, and whether password protection, link expiry, referrer analytics and country analytics are available. See Presskits.

Sway Verified

Sway Verified appears in the plan comparison marked Mobile only. It is requested from the Sway mobile app, not from the web app. The Sway Verified tab in a page's Settings is the separate claim flow for taking ownership of a page, covered in Claim an existing page.

Reading a locked row

Three different things grey a row out, and only two of them announce themselves. Hover the row and read the tooltip before assuming a plan is the problem.

The sparkle is the only reliable signal that money is the answer. It sits at the far right of the row and appears only when the rail is expanded; on the narrow rail the tooltip carries the whole message. Locked tabs inside a screen use the same sparkle and the same wording.

A silent grey row is the common case, and the rail will not explain it. When a row has nothing to say, its tooltip falls back to the row's own name, which the wide rail then suppresses because it would only repeat the label you can already read. Hovering does nothing at all. On the narrow rail you get the name back, which is no more informative. Two things produce that silence:

• Sway Tickets is off on the event. Five event rows are gated by that flag: Tickets, Presales, Coupons, Scanners and CRM. Only Tickets and Scanners say so. Presales and Coupons go silent, and so does CRM once its plan requirement is met, since the sparkle only stands for the plan. Turn the flag on in Event settings and all five come back together.
• You lack the permission. Ask an owner to grant it on Permissions.

Do not read Enable Sway Tickets to use this option. as proof that the flag is the cause: Tickets and Scanners print that message whenever they are greyed, including when the real reason is a missing permission. Check the flag on the event's own Settings screen rather than trusting the tooltip.

A row can be locked by a plan and a permission at once, and on an event by the Sway Tickets flag as well. CRM needs Starter, the CRM view permission and the flag; the crew API row needs Studio and the API permission. Satisfying one leaves the row grey.

The plan panel

Where a whole screen is gated rather than a row, the screen opens and shows the plan panel in place of the tool. You get it on Notifications for a page on Basic, and on the crew API screen below Studio.

The panel carries, from the top:

• Notifications used with a counter for the current month and a progress bar, then You're currently on … plan with a Manage subscription link straight to that entity's Subscription screen.
• A Monthly / Annual toggle. Annual carries a 2 months free badge.
• Four plan cards, with prices fetched live from Stripe.
• Common features, a table comparing all four plans row by row.
• A short FAQ, then the pause and VAT notes.

The Starter and Studio cards start the matching checkout. The Roster card opens a contact form instead: Roster is quoted, not bought from a button.

What the Subscription screen shows

The screen has three shapes.

On Basic

• Current Plan with a grey Basic badge and Free plan with essential features, over the five plan lines and a Storage usage bar.
• No active subscription, with Upgrade to Starter to unlock premium features for this page., a billing-cycle picker and Subscribe to Starter.
• Upgrade to Studio, with Create a Crew to manage multiple pages and unlock even more features. and a View Pricing link.

On Starter

• Current Plan with a Starter badge, the plan lines and the storage bar.
• Billing Status: a status badge, the Billing Cycle and the Current Period as a start-to-end date range. The badge prints Stripe's own status word, so you will see values such as active, trialing, past_due, paused or canceled rather than a Sway label.
• An action card with Switch to Annual or Switch to Monthly, a pause box, a Cancel Subscription button, and Undo Cancellation once a cancellation is pending.
• Manage Billing, described as Manage payment methods, view invoices and billing details via Stripe. and opening the Stripe billing portal.

Managed by a crew

The page shows This page is managed by a Crew. Billing is handled at the Crew level. with a View Crew link, then Current Plan (via Crew) listing the crew's plan and the page's storage bar. Nothing is buyable here.

If the page still has its own paid subscription running underneath, a warning card appears: This page has an active standalone subscription, with Consider cancelling it to avoid double billing. and a Cancel standalone subscription button. When that subscription is already winding down the same card turns informational and tells you no action is needed.

A page absorbed into a crew mid-period is force-paused rather than double-charged. The screen says This page was force-paused due to Crew absorption. and offers Request prorated refund on annual billing.

Crew billing

A crew's screen is headed Subscription & Billing, and it works the same way with two additions: page slots are bought and dropped from a picker on that screen, and a Roster crew hides every self-serve control behind This subscription is managed by your account manager. A failed payment raises Payment Past Due across the top.

The full walkthrough, including the page-slot picker and what happens to a page when it joins or leaves a crew, is in Crews.

When a limit stops you

The plan surfaces as a wall in a few predictable places.

• Permissions shows Members as a used-over-limit figure. Once direct members reach the limit, the add button is disabled and its tooltip reads Member limit reached. Upgrade your plan to add more members. Members who reach the page through a crew do not count against it.
• A crew's Pages screen refuses a new page with Page limit reached — upgrade to add more.
• On artist pages, a line above the presskit list counts how many are used against the plan's allowance. At the ceiling the New Presskit button is replaced by an Upgrade button, tooltipped Upgrade your plan to unlock premium features., which is a link to that page's Subscription screen.
• That same Upgrade button, with the same tooltip, sits in the header of several screens while the page is on Basic. It is a shortcut to Subscription, nothing more.