10 · Plans, allowances & limits

Every gate and platform limit mentioned anywhere in this manual, collected on one page. Every workspace runs on Enterprise, in an agreement with our team, and a new workspace starts on a 7 day trial; since 2 November 2026 there is no plan to pick. When a chapter says a feature "requires an AI plan" or is "metered by plan", this is the page that defines what that means.

How this manual describes plan gating

The manual uses a small, fixed vocabulary so you always know what a gate means:

• requires an AI plan — the feature needs AI, which Enterprise and the trial include.
• metered by plan — the feature works, but each run counts against a periodic allowance (for example talk time with Vera per month). The screen that meters it says what is left and links to the Enterprise agreement request for more.
• org owners only — not a plan gate at all: the feature is open to everyone in the workspace's agreement, but only organization owners can use it.

Allowance windows are rolling, not calendar months: "per month" means the last 30 days, "per week" the last 7. An allowance frees up on its own as older runs age out of the window.

The plans

Every workspace runs on Enterprise, and a new one starts on a 7 day trial. Moving to Enterprise, or asking for more seats, minutes or analyst work, is one request with our team: Enterprise agreement. It is set up by our team and billed by invoice.

Enterprise carries every AI feature and every tool on the site. The trial carries a starter set of them for its week, set out below.

Enterprise is priced to the size of your team and your contract estate and scoped with you, on a three year agreement as standard with a one year term available at a premium. The seats and contracts you have are the ones in your agreement, and onboarding, which covers setup and loading your contracts, is a one time fee.

Seats are a hard cap, not a billing meter. The number is how many people can be on the roster at once, and everyone counts toward it: active members, pending invites, and blocked members alike. The cap is checked whenever someone is added, by invite, domain join, or SCIM provisioning, and it never removes anyone already on the roster. When it is full, remove a member, revoke a pending invite, or ask our team for more seats with the Enterprise agreement request; Members shows seats in use against the cap.

Every app is open on Enterprise. The add-ons are people rather than features, scoped and priced in your agreement and billed by invoice: Negotiation Services puts a VendorBenchmark negotiator on your deal (fixed fee or contingency), Advisory hours book senior analyst sessions through the concierge screen, and a Dedicated Team puts VendorBenchmark people on your account on a standing basis.

One benchmark credit a request. Each benchmark or report a human analyst delivers uses one credit from the allowance above, and since 2 October 2026 a request sent from Ask a human uses one too (the window calls it an analyst review), whether it carries a document, a written question or a call. Before a request is sent the screen says how many credits you have left and asks you to confirm; with none left it is not sent.

With the month's allowance used, a proposal can still go for expert review with a benchmark credit: an organization owner requests one directly on the proposal page ($5,000 per analyst benchmark, billed by invoice), and our team confirms and adds it. See Contract Office.

Training workspaces

A training workspace is not a plan you buy. It is a classroom copy of the platform that the VendorBenchmark team provisions for a training cohort, one per trainee, and it never expires. It opens on the sample portfolio with five practice documents already on file, every tool and every AI feature on, the research library readable online (no downloads), and a benchmark library that carries the Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud benchmark and nothing else: every other line in the library wears a lock, exactly as on the trial, and the sheet names what the training workspace carries when you open one. The training tour rides every screen of a training workspace and nowhere else. Trainees sign in with a password the trainer hands them; no email leaves the platform for a training account.

Project access

Project access is not a plan you buy either. It comes with a project the VendorBenchmark team runs with you, and it lasts as long as that project's Client Room is open.

• The people on the project work on Enterprise. Everyone allocated to an open project has what the Enterprise plan includes across the platform: every app, every benchmark, the research library with its downloads, and Vera. This holds whatever plan their organization is on.
• A workspace with no paid plan is put on the Project plan. It has no end date, no countdown and no trial email: unlimited uploads, AI use within fair use, every benchmark, 4 hours a month of Vera on calls, up to 25 seats, and the research library readable online. Colleagues in the workspace who are not on the project read research on the page; the files download for the people on the project.
• An organization that already has a paid plan keeps it. Its project changes nothing about the plan; only the people on the project are lifted to Enterprise while it is open.
• It ends when our team closes the room. The lift to Enterprise ends the same minute, and Vera stops joining the project's calls. A workspace that was on the Project plan then keeps three things: the project room to read, its own account settings, and the support messages. The apps, the benchmarks, Vera and the renewal calendar are not part of it. A paid organization simply carries on with its own plan.
• Closing is not deleting. The wall, the minutes, the plan, the reports, the files and the emails stay as they were, and our team can open the room again, which brings the access back with it.

What the trial includes, and for how long

The trial runs 7 days from the day your workspace is approved. Uploads are unlimited across that week and AI use is included within fair use, exactly as on a paid plan, so the figures you see are your own rather than a demo's. Three limits are worth knowing before they surprise you:

1. The benchmark library is two benchmarks. Trial workspaces run the Salesforce Sales + Service Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud benchmarks. The library still lists every vendor and every curve, so you can see the shape of what you would be buying, and the lines your plan does not carry wear a small lock. Open one and the sheet names what that line covers and what Enterprise would tell you about your own document, instead of pricing a deal you have not bought the benchmark for. Saving a position and sharing a snapshot follow the same rule. The same lock shows in Jump to (Ctrl/⌘ K): a benchmark row the trial does not carry says Not available on the trial plan, and choosing it lands in the library's notice rather than on the tool.
2. Research reads, it does not download. You can open 10 research papers, in full and online. Papers you have already opened stay open and reopening one never costs another, so the 10 is 10 papers, not 10 clicks. Open an eleventh and the reader explains the limit instead of doing nothing. One note is free on every plan and never counts: Negotiator's Guide: Oracle, the note the Advanced tour opens.
3. The window ends, the workspace does not. See the paragraph below.

Getting another 30 days. On the day the trial ends we email the organization's owners a short survey: four questions, about two minutes, read by a person. Ask for the extension on that form and the workspace reopens for 30 more days the moment you send it, with everything exactly as you left it. No card and no sales call. The survey takes one response per workspace, so the extension is available once. If the first email gets buried, two reminders follow and the offer stays attached to the same link until you answer it.

Research reads on the page on the trial; the files download on Enterprise. The trial opens its documents in full, at all three depths, and passes them on with a public share link or by forwarding them by email; the Word and PDF files themselves leave the library on Enterprise only, where the action row carries the Download button. On the trial that button reads Downloads on Enterprise and, pressed, says what to do instead. Partner-program firms also read research online without downloads, per program terms, whatever their plan.

When the window ends the workspace parks rather than closes. Renewal Radar keeps the renewal calendar, the notice deadlines and their alerts running, and the contracts you already created stay readable; the benchmark tools, the research library and the rest of the platform return the day the workspace moves to Enterprise. Radar reads the same wherever you sign in, in the browser, the desktop app and the phone app.

AI allowances by plan

AI use is included, within fair use. AI analyses and reports, agent requests, proposal redline scans, side-by-side compare scans, cloud cost analyses and instant benchmark runs are part of Enterprise and of the trial.

Two AI allowances carry a stated number: talk time, because it is provider time on a live line rather than a request, and AI summaries:

AI summaries are counted across everyone in the organization: up to 200 in any 30 days, for every organization. Regenerate writes a new version and counts; Vera's review of a summary, a question about it and a run that failed do not. At 200 the sheet says so and names the day the next one frees up. AI summary describes the sheet.

Every voice surface draws on the same pool, because they are the same minutes. Two further ceilings apply on top and are set by us, not by your agreement: a single call stops at 45 minutes, and a call with no speech on either side for two minutes ends itself. When the month's talk time runs out, a call is refused with a plain sentence about when the allowance renews; the window is rolling, so it refills as older calls age out of it. Owners can ask us to raise the ceiling on an account.

Contract Agents are not on that table and carry no allowance: reading a document is open on the trial and Enterprise alike, and the daily fair-use cap below is the only ceiling. Where a decode feeds a written AI report (the negotiation dossier, a playbook run), the report side still counts against your AI analyses allowance.

Fair-use daily caps also protect the conversational surfaces (asking Vera) and the instant tools (Contract Agent, Second opinion). You will rarely meet them, and you will never meet one unwarned: once less than half of a day's cap remains, a quiet meter appears near the input ("7 of 10 questions left today") with a link to ask our team for more. Trial workspaces, where asking Vera is metered at ten questions a day, always see the meter. Caps reset at midnight UTC.

Platform limits

The fixed limits that apply regardless of plan. Each links to the section where the limit matters.

File uploads are validated on type, size, and file signature, not just the extension, and every upload screen states its own limits in place.

Related: Enterprise agreement · Troubleshooting · Glossary & FAQ

Next: Chapter 11 · Troubleshooting