Workspaces

A workspace is the one thing General Text is organised around. It holds files, apps and people, and it carries its own encryption key and its own bill. There is nothing above it: no account container, no organization, no library of things you own. You sign in as a person, and what you belong to is a set of workspaces.

Signing up makes your first one, named after you. Make as many more as you like: one for work, one for personal notes, one per team or project. Two workspaces share nothing except you.

What a workspace has

A name and a picture. How it appears to its people, in Settings → Workspace.
An @handle. Apps this workspace publishes appear in the gallery at @handle/app. Renaming it keeps old links working.
An id. The address behind every /w/… link, the folder on your disk, and the sync connection. It never changes.
Its own key. Everything it syncs is encrypted under a key only its people hold. See Encryption.
Its own subscription. Free or paid, per workspace. See Billing below.

Moving around

The top row of the sidebar is the workspace you are in. Click it to open the switcher: every workspace you belong to, the current one ringed, each labelled with its folder on disk (on desktop) or its @handle, how many people are in it, and whether its sync is paused. New workspace is at the bottom. ⌘1 to ⌘9 (Ctrl on Windows and Linux) jump straight to the first nine.

Below the workspace row, five rows are always there:

Search (⌘K) opens the jump bar: type to find any file or app and press Enter.
Apps is the management page for every app in the workspace.
Shared Files is everything in the workspace that isn't an app's own data.
People is the roster: who is here, what they can see, and the agent seats.
Settings opens the workspace's settings, with the section list under it.

Then a divider, then the workspace's apps. Click one to open it in the content pane; the chevron on a row reveals the files that app manages. At the bottom is the last version pushed to any app, the sync state, and the You bar: your name, the light/dark toggle, and, when you expand it, your own settings and Sign out.

The arrangement is yours, not the workspace's. On the Apps page you can put apps into named groups (Slack's sections: a heading you can fold shut) by dragging them, reorder them inside a group, drag the groups themselves, and hide the ones you don't use (the eye on an app's row). Workspaces reorder and hide the same way in Settings → You → Workspaces.

All of it is per person: the workspace's apps are everyone's, but how your sidebar is arranged is yours, and it follows your login to every device. Deleting a group never removes an app from the workspace; its apps just go back to being ungrouped.

People

Everyone in a workspace holds one of three roles, managed on People:

Owner. Whoever made it. Everything an admin can do, plus deleting the workspace.
Admin. Can change the workspace, its people and its keys.
Member. Can open and edit everything in it.

There is no guest role and no read-only role: a person is either in the workspace or not, and everyone in it counts toward the price. Agent seats are not people and are never billed as one (see Agent Access).

Invite from People by email. A pending invitation is the same row as an accepted person, so you can see who hasn't arrived yet and change their role before they do.

Who sees what

By default everyone in a workspace sees everything in it: every file under Shared Files, and every app.

One thing narrows that: an app can be locked to a list of people, from Access on its row on the Apps page. A locked app disappears from the sidebar of everyone outside the list, and the server stops delivering its files to them. Two edges worth stating plainly:

A lock works forwards, and it is not a second key. Everyone in the workspace holds the one workspace key; the lock is the server refusing to send those files on. So it stops delivery from now on, and cannot recall what already reached someone's device.
File names stay visible to every member. The file list is one encrypted document that every member of the workspace holds, so a locked app's file names are readable even to someone who cannot open the files themselves.

If something has to be invisible to someone, give it its own workspace rather than a lock.

Billing

Each workspace is billed on its own, and the owner pays. Everyone else in it is free.

Free. A workspace with no subscription still syncs, encrypted, to every device: one person (you) plus the included agent seat, three apps, and 1 GB. You can own three free workspaces; making a fourth means subscribing one of the others first.

Paid. $12 a month covers a workspace of up to five people and 100 GB. Each person past five is $12 more. Annual is $120, which works out at $10 a month. Storage is per workspace and does not scale with people. Past 100 GB nothing breaks: text keeps syncing, the billing page says you are over, and new uploads of binary files stop at a hard ceiling of 500 GB. If you need more, get in touch.

Settings → Workspace → Billing shows the tier, the people counted, the storage used against the limit, and, once subscribed, a link to the Stripe billing portal. Payments run through Stripe, and checkout opens in your browser.

If a subscription lapses, nothing is deleted, and nothing you already have stops working. A failed payment keeps everything working for a week while you fix it. After that, for 30 days the workspace stays readable through the server, including history and downloads, and every write is refused with a line saying so. Then it stops syncing altogether, and the data is retained rather than dropped.

What that leaves you with, for as long as you like and without paying: on any device that already has the workspace, the files, the apps and (on desktop) the folder on your disk go on working exactly as before, and you can keep editing them. The edits simply stay on that device. What you cannot do is sync, add an app, or pull the workspace down onto a new machine, since all three need the server.

Deleting a workspace

Settings → Workspace → Danger zone, owner only. Deleting is permanent: every file goes for everyone, its people lose access, and any subscription is cancelled. On desktop the folder that was mirroring it stays on your disk, so what you had locally is still readable there.