Figuring Out Our Teams Needs
(As in, our needs as far as Teams is concerned.) Basically, we run a business operating a network of freelancers. We found Slack super-useful when we first started using it about 5 years ago, but quickly hit a place where we required paid features, and just couldn't justify the several-hundred-dollars-a-month expense of putting all our freelancers on a paid plan (back then there were 40 or so of us, now it's more like 80). We moved to another tool (Ryver) which offered what we needed at a much better price, and have been reasonably happy with it ever since, but have recently started to feel that it might be faltering (support and updates have died off, feature requests have been left undealt with for years etc. etc.), and are now worried that it might fold, which would leave us without a vital tool for our business. As such, we've been looking at alternatives, and Teams seems like it could be a really viable option for us, but at $12.50/user/month for the paid plan, we would only be able to switch to it if either the free version was workable for our needs, or if there might be a way of having only some people on the paid plan and others join as guests. Despite doing a bunch of reading about the tool, I can't quite seem to get a definitive answer on this. For a start, there appears to be some kind of 5 guests per licensed user rule - does this mean that in order to have our entire network of freelancers (around 75 individuals) involved, we'd need to have...14 paid users as part of our Teams setup? And how is that allowance treated if, say, one of those paying members is already a member of another teams organisation elsewhere? Or does none of this matter if we're using the free version? Apologies - as I say, I've tried to unpick this through doing a bit of reading, but things get very soupy when trying to figure out the various subscriptions and versions on offer. Any help massively appreciated!