Roles and permissions

Ochre has four fixed roles: owner, admin, agent, and light_agent. Roles are workspace-scoped — a person can be admin in one workspace and light agent in another. There are no custom roles and no granular permission editor.

The four roles in one sentence each

• Owner owns billing and the workspace itself. Exactly one per workspace.
• Admin runs the workspace day to day: settings, integrations, team.
• Agent handles customer conversations and manages their queue.
• Light agent is a read-only collaborator — sees conversations, leaves internal notes, cannot reply. Free.

Permission grid

| Capability | Owner | Admin | Agent | Light | |---|:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:| | Reply to customers | yes | yes | yes | no | | Internal notes and @mentions | yes | yes | yes | yes | | Read all conversations | yes | yes | yes | yes | | Assign, snooze, close | yes | yes | yes | no | | Edit knowledge base articles | yes | yes | yes | no | | Invite admin / agent | yes | yes | no | no | | Invite light agent | yes | yes | yes | no | | Edit workspace settings | yes | yes | no | no | | Edit branding and domains | yes | yes | no | no | | Edit routing rules | yes | yes | no | no | | Manage integrations | yes | yes | no | no | | Configure AI agent | yes | yes | no | no | | Manage email blocklist | yes | yes | yes | no | | View reports | yes | yes | yes | yes | | Open Stripe billing portal | yes | no | no | no | | Change plan / seat count | yes | no | no | no | | Transfer ownership | yes | no | no | no | | Request workspace deletion | yes | no | no | no | | Request data export | yes | yes | no | no |

Billable vs free

• Billable: owner, admin, agent. Counted against your seat total. $39/seat/month on Team.
• Free: light agent. Unlimited.

If you are bringing in product engineers, sales reps, or success managers who only need to read conversations and add context, light agent is the right call. They show up in @mention autocomplete, they can leave internal notes, and they cost nothing.

For pricing detail see pricing-overview.

How to pick a role

| Person | Recommended role | |---|---| | Founder, head of support | Owner or admin | | Support manager | Admin | | Frontline support rep | Agent | | Engineer who fields escalations | Light agent | | PM who reads tickets weekly | Light agent | | Contractor doing tier-1 | Agent |

A common mistake: making every engineer an agent because "they reply to bug reports." If they reply once a month, light agent plus internal notes is enough — the engineer leaves a note and an agent sends.

Changing someone's role

Go to Settings → Team, click the member, pick a new role. Changes are immediate. Promoting light agent to agent or higher fills a billable seat and may bump the next invoice. Demoting an agent to light agent frees a seat at the next billing cycle.

You cannot promote a light agent directly to owner. Promote to admin first, then transfer-ownership.

Why no custom roles

Four roles cover the cases we kept seeing: a billable doer (agent), a billable settings-having doer (admin), a free reader (light agent), and one billing person (owner). A granular per-permission editor is the kind of feature that adds a lot of complexity for marginal value. If you have a use case that does not fit, email hello@ochrehq.com and we will hear it out.

What to do next

• Use inviting-team-members to add the team.
• Read transfer-ownership before changing the owner.
• See seats-and-roles for the billing impact of each role.