Teams and Sharing
There are three ways to let someone else near a document, and they are different sizes.
| What it is | Who it suits | |
|---|---|---|
| A team | A shared account with its own subdomain and its own document library | People you work with regularly |
| A share link | A URL that opens one document, to view or to edit | Anyone, including people with no account |
| Sharing with a person | One named person gets read access to one document | Someone outside your team who needs to see one thing |
Teams
A team is an account of its own. It has its own address, acme.hyperclay.com, its own documents, its
own folders and its own trash. Nobody logs in “as” the team. You sign in as yourself and act on the
team’s account, and every save is attributed to you.
Creating a team needs an active Maker plan. Open the profile menu at the top right of the dashboard and
choose New team…, or go to /_/dashboard/teams/new. The dashboard currently offers one team per
owner. You choose two things:
- A team name, which is what people see. The owner can change it later.
- A team address, which becomes the subdomain and the folder your documents live in.
The team address works like a username. The owner can change it once every 30 days. Changing it changes every URL that uses the team address and revokes existing view and edit links. People who were given access by name keep their access.
Team names share one namespace with usernames and claimed subdomains, so a name already in use anywhere on Hyperclay is refused.
Joining a team changes nothing about your own account. Your plan, your personal documents and your own subdomain are untouched, and you keep them if you leave.
Roles
Every member holds one of three roles.
| Owner | Editor | Viewer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open and download documents | yes | yes | yes |
| View version history | yes | yes | yes |
| Restore a version | yes | yes | no |
| Save changes to a document | yes | yes | no |
| Create documents and folders, upload files | yes | yes | no |
| Rename, move and trash | yes | yes | no |
| See the trash page and restore from it | yes | yes | no |
| Delete permanently and empty the trash | yes | no | no |
| Edit code | yes, if their own account is on a paid plan | yes, same condition | no |
| Document sharing, privacy and signups | yes | yes | no |
| Team settings, subdomains and custom domains | yes | no | no |
| Invite people, change a role, remove a member | yes | no | no |
| Leave the team | no, transfer or delete it first | yes | yes |
Two things about that table are worth stating on their own.
Code editing follows the person, not the role. An editor on a free account can create, save, rename, move and trash a team’s documents, and gets no code editor. An editor on a paid plan gets one. The role decides what you may do to the team’s documents; your own plan decides whether the code tools are available to you at all.
Billing is never a team thing. Checkout, billing management, upgrades and changing a username all act on your own personal account. There is no separate team card: a team is billed through its owner’s Maker subscription, which includes four people, the owner and three editors. Each extra editor adds $3/month, or $2/month on annual billing. Viewers and share links are always free.
Managing members
Open the team dashboard and choose Members. The owner can invite someone by email as a Viewer or Editor. An invitation is valid for 14 days.
The same page lists current members and pending invitations. The owner can change a role, remove a member, resend an invitation or cancel it. Editors and viewers can leave from this page. The owner must transfer or delete the team before leaving.
What an editor is trusted with
An editor can save anything into a team document, including scripts. Every team document is served from one subdomain, which means one browser origin, so a script one editor saves runs with the same access as everything else on that subdomain.
The code editor being hidden from a free account is a convenience, not a boundary. Ordinary saving accepts a whole HTML document, so anyone who can save can change the code, whether or not the code editor is available to them in the interface.
So: invite people as editors when you trust them with the team’s documents the way you trust yourself. Invite them as viewers when you do not. There is no in-between role, on purpose.
The shared allowance
A team has no allowance of its own. It draws on the plan of the member who owns it, and that is a single pool covering the owner’s personal account and every team they own. Creating a team adds no capacity.
A teammate’s upload counts against the owner’s allowance. On the Maker plan that is 2 GB in total and 100 MB per file, shared.
The owner sees the plan on Team settings. Other members see only that it is a team; whose card is charged is not shown to them.
The one exception is when the plan lapses. Then every member is told who can fix it, because they need to know: the team becomes read-only until the owner renews, and everyone can still open and download everything.
Share links
Open the document’s … menu and choose Share…. The dialog has Address, View link, Edit link and People tabs. The link tabs let you create a link, copy it, show its QR code or revoke it.
Creating a share link needs a paid plan. If the plan ends, you can still copy or revoke an existing link.
Each document can have two links, and they are different.
- A view link opens the document, downloads it, reads its JSON, and opens its version history. On a collection dashboard it also reads the collection’s records.
- An edit link does everything a view link does, and can save.
Both work on a private document. Both are just a URL with a token in it, so anyone you send it to can use it, with no account and no sign-in.
Neither link reaches the owner’s side of the document. No settings, no privacy, no subdomains, no custom domains, no uploads, no code editor, no template reset, no managing the links themselves, and no deleting a collection record. A link grants exactly what its mode says.
An edit link lets someone change the document’s code. Saving accepts the whole HTML file, so an edit link is not limited to text and CMS fields. Send it to people you trust with the document.
Revoking a link is permanent. The link stops working straight away, any live connection it was holding is closed, and creating a link again gives you a new URL and a new QR code. The old one never comes back.
A share URL contains the document’s current address, so renaming the document, or moving it, or renaming your account invalidates the link. Create a new one after any of those.
What a link does not protect
Files stay public at their own URLs. An image or a PDF embedded in a document is served from its own address, and that address works for anyone who has it, whether or not they hold a link to the document. A private document does not make the files inside it private.
A link to a collection dashboard includes the collection’s records. Someone holding a view link can list the records and read one. They cannot delete one.
Sharing one document with a person
Open the document’s … menu, choose Share…, then open People and enter an email address. Adding someone or resending an invitation needs a paid plan. You can still remove a viewer or cancel an invitation after the plan ends.
The person gets read access to that one document. They can open it even when it is private, and view its version history. They cannot edit it.
What happens next depends on them:
- They already have a confirmed account. They get access immediately and an email with a link straight to the document.
- They have an account but have not confirmed their address. They confirm it first, then land on the document.
- They have no account. They get an invitation, good for 14 days, that creates a free account when they accept it.
An invitation can only be accepted by the address it was sent to. Signing in as somebody else and opening the link does not work.
Accepting a document share changes nothing about an existing account. It does not confirm an address, it does not alter a plan, and it grants nothing beyond that one document.
There is no editor version of this. Someone outside your team who needs to change a document either joins the team or holds an edit link.
Shared with me
Documents other people have shared with you by name appear in a Shared with me tab on the dashboard. The tab can appear on personal and team dashboards. Each row shows the document, who owns it, and buttons to Open or to Leave.
The tab is hidden when nobody has shared anything with you, and it does not appear inside a folder.
A share on a document inside somebody’s folder does not reveal the folder. You see the document and nothing around it.
Who else is on the document
When more than one person has the same document open you see them, as a small stack of initials in the corner. Hovering shows a name. Solid means they can edit, hollow means they are reading.
Names are shown to people who can already see the document. Someone reading a public page with no access of their own sees a count and no names. A view link holder can see the document, so they do see names, and they appear to everyone else as “Guest 1”, “Guest 2” and so on.
The count of anonymous readers counts connections, not people. One person with three tabs open is three connections.
You also get a one-line notice when somebody else changes the part of the page you were working in. Dismiss it and carry on.
This is not simultaneous editing. There are no live cursors and no selections. Two people editing different parts of a page merge cleanly. When two people edit the same paragraph, the last save still wins. Presence makes that visible instead of leaving it hidden.
Version history
Version history says “Recorded by”, not “Saved by”, and the difference is real.
Some versions capture what the document looked like before an action, and the name on them is whoever caused the version to be taken, not whoever wrote those bytes. A first-save safety backup and a restore backup are both like this.
Saves made through the desktop app do not create a platform version.
The name shown is the person’s current display name, so renaming yourself renames you throughout the history.
Moving a document into a team
Open the document or folder’s … menu and choose Move to another account…. A move to another account revokes every view and edit link for the moved documents. Access granted to named people stays in place.
Moving a folder carries everything under it: the documents, the folder structure, the files uploaded into it, and anything in the trash below it.
Moving a single document carries only the document and its versions. Files it uses stay on your personal account and keep working at the URLs they already have.
Because a file’s URL contains the account it belongs to, moving a folder changes the address of every file inside it. Hyperclay rewrites those addresses inside the documents it moved, and records the rewrite as a version with a note saying how many links it updated.
Before the move it shows you what it cannot fix: any document outside the folder that used one of those files, and will therefore break. It names the ones you are allowed to see and says generically that others may be affected.
Three kinds of reference cannot be found by any scan, and the move does not claim otherwise:
- a URL the page’s own JavaScript builds at run time
- a reference inside an uploaded stylesheet
- a reference that exists only in an older version of a document
A claimed subdomain does not block the move. Hyperclay releases it automatically. A document cannot move while it has people signed up to it, because their instances belong to their accounts and cannot move with the document. A move is also refused when the same name already exists at the destination or when it would put content more than five folders deep.
Moving needs the settings permission on the source and the create permission on the destination, so a team editor cannot move a team’s folder out into their personal account.
When a plan ends
Nothing is deleted and nothing is hidden. Every file, folder, upload, version, custom domain, share link and team membership stays exactly where it was.
What a free account can still do:
- open and download every document it owns, private ones included
- save changes to a document
- upload files, up to 100 MB in total and 10 MB per file
- duplicate a document
- rename and delete a document
- rename, move and delete folders
- rename, serve and delete an upload
- use the trash: restore, purge, empty
- list, view and restore versions
- manage the records in a collection it already has
- keep every custom domain resolving
- see billing history and upgrade
What comes with a subscription:
- creating a blank document
- creating a folder
- the code editor, Add CMS and Make Malleable
- applying a template
- signups, collection mode, discoverability and claimed subdomains
- creating share links, adding a person and resending an invitation
- configuring a custom domain
- changing your username
- generating a desktop sync key
- creating and owning a team
Tidying up is always allowed. A free account can remove a custom domain, copy or revoke an existing share link, remove a viewer, cancel an invitation, turn signups off, make a document private, make one public again, move things around, and delete a folder. You are never locked out of cleaning up after yourself.
A refusal that a subscription would lift says so, and paying reopens it immediately.
On a team, and in the desktop app
A team whose owner’s plan lapses becomes read-only. Everyone can open and download everything; nobody can save, create or upload until the owner renews.
The desktop app tells you. When a plan has ended, syncing a change says so plainly rather than retrying. Reading, exporting and deleting keep working.
When an account or a team is deleted
Deleting stops access straight away: from the moment you confirm, every address that resolves the account refuses. Moving the files off the live tree takes a few seconds more.
A deleted team can be restored for 30 days. Open the profile menu and choose Deleted teams… to see its restore deadline and restore it. The deleted team keeps counting against the owner’s allowance during those 30 days. The space comes back when the restore window ends.