The SurveyCTO team-based subscription model

A SurveyCTO team is a billing unit. It is also a top level group on your server which allows you to restrict the access of specific users to certain forms and datasets. This partitioning of a server for different users doing different work can be broadly referred to in various ways, including “projects”, “folders”, and “spaces”. On the SurveyCTO platform, it’s referred to as “teams”.

Most users have a single-team subscription and find that it meets their needs. With a single-team subscription, you can still manage user roles to control who can see and collect data from all forms; see and download data from all forms and datasets; and add, edit, and delete all forms and datasets. However, a multi-team subscription goes further by allowing you to control which users can have access to specific forms and datasets.

Each team gets their own secure area for their data collection work, and you control which users have what access to each team’s forms and datasets. Each team also gets 10,000 incoming form submissions free each month, plus three users who can interface directly with our professional support team (everybody can access our online support center and community support, but every team has up to three users authorized to open new support requests).

A team can be anything you want. You do not have to create SurveyCTO teams that correspond to teams in your organization. However, if you have a project each in three countries, for example, and you want to create a separate group for each country team to only allow them to access their own forms and data, you would need to have three teams on your subscription. Similarly, if you have three projects in the same country but want to separate the access each project team has, you would need to subscribe to a three-team subscription and create a separate team for each project.

If you have questions about teams, please contact us at sales@surveycto.com.

A team is what you make it! Because a team allows you to silo your forms and data and create fine-grained user roles, a team could be a project, department, country, type of survey, or even something else, depending on your own organization’s structure and set-up. Users will commonly create different teams for different projects they are managing or, sometimes, one team for each country office that oversees multiple projects. But exactly what you define and configure your teams as is in your control.

For more fully partitioned access to forms and data, you could set up separate independently-managed subscriptions. However, one subscription with multiple teams presents some benefits. You can manage a single set of logins; share common resources, as in a shared form or dataset library; and enjoy centralized management and billing. This way, you get all the benefits of separate subscriptions in that you can fully partition access, as well as a range of conveniences that sharing a single subscription can offer. Welcome to SurveyCTO teams!

If you’d like to learn more about SurveyCTO teams, please see the FAQ “What is a SurveyCTO team?”.

A submission is an individual, completed survey that has been uploaded to your server (either via web forms or via the SurveyCTO Collect Android and iOS apps). For example, you have created a survey called “Baseline survey”. And now this survey is to be administered to and filled in once for each of the 1,000 respondents who are part of your project. A filled in and uploaded survey on each respondent counts as one submission. So you will have used 1,000 submissions once all 1,000 respondents have been surveyed.

A submission is counted against your submission limit (or against your extra submission credits) when it is uploaded and submitted to your server, whether it is collected and submitted as a web form or collected and submitted via our SurveyCTO Collect Android and iOS apps. Note: selecting the option to Save and submit data at the end of a form in the test view of the form designer will count as a submission.

A form is a survey form/questionnaire/instrument you have programmed using our online Form Designer or using an Excel/XLSForm or Google Sheet template and uploaded to your server. Forms can be kept as drafts while you are editing them, until they are ready to deploy. Once deployed a form can be used to collect data, either as a web survey or via our SurveyCTO Collect Android and iOS apps. You can revise existing forms, even deployed forms, without adding new ones – just click “Edit” or “Upload” next to the form title on the “Design” tab of your server console – and any deployed form can be used to collect data simultaneously via web surveys in any browser and offline using our SurveyCTO Collect Android and iOS apps.

Most users have a single-team subscription. For each team, SurveyCTO costs $220 per month before any quantity discounts. That includes unlimited users, unlimited devices, unlimited storage, and a form submission allowance of 10,000 submissions/team/month that covers all but the largest data-collection efforts. It also includes 24×7 access to a professional support team and all of the features you need, including enterprise-level features like fine-grained permissions control and single-sign-on (SSO).

If you’d like to learn more about SurveyCTO teams, please see the FAQ “What is a SurveyCTO team?”. If you’re interested in enterprise pricing for organization-wide use, please contact us at sales@surveycto.com.

Yes, we offer enterprise pricing for organization-wide use. Please contact us at sales@surveycto.com for more information.

Adjusting teams is easy, and you can do it any time. To adjust the number of teams you pay for, just go to your account’s manage subscription page and, under the “Subscription level” section under “SUBSCRIPTION”, click the link to “Add/remove teams”. Then follow the steps to adjust the team number and confirm the change to your subscription.

If you are paying month-to-month, the total charge to your card on the next billing cycle will be adjusted to reflect the new number of teams you have on your server. If you paid for multiple team-months in advance, adding a new team will simply use up your prepaid team-months balance faster rather than incurring a separate charge on your card; deleting a team will use up your prepaid team-months balance slower and extend your overall subscription period.

For example, if you pay for 6 months for a three-team subscription in advance, you will have paid for a total of 18 team-months. Two months into the subscription, you will have used 2*3 = 6 team-months and have 12 team-months left. If, at this point, you decide to add a fourth team, you can do so at no extra charge. For the remaining months, you will simply use up 4 team-months of your remaining team-months each month, so your total subscription will last another 3 months before you need to purchase more team-months. Similarly, if at the start of your third month you realize you no longer need a third team and delete it, you will use up 2 team-months for the remaining months, and your subscription will last another 6 months before needing to be renewed.

If you’d like to learn more about SurveyCTO teams, please see the FAQ “What is a SurveyCTO team?”.

If you have an especially large data collection project and need more than the 10,000 free submissions you get per team per month, you can also add more submissions at any time for $20 per 1,000 additional submission credits. They’ll only be used when or if you go over the 10,000/team/month limit in a given month. Credits are pay-per-use, not monthly, so don’t expire each month.

The 10,000 submissions/team/month that are included with the subscription are also pooled. If you have a server with three teams, your server will have 30,000 submissions/month included, which can be allocated to teams however you want (e.g., team A may have a larger project that uses up 20,000 of those submissions while teams B and C each use 5,000 submissions).

If you want some teams to have fully separate accounts, with their own billing and subscription management, then you can sign up for separate SurveyCTO servers for each team via the sign-up page of our website. But the monthly cost of adding a team is the same whether you add it to an existing subscription or create a new one.

If you’d like to learn more about SurveyCTO teams, please see the FAQ “What is a SurveyCTO team?”.

Yes! We give you a 10% discount whenever you pay for 12 or more team-months (or 15% for 120 or more team-months). For example, if you pay a year in advance for a single team, the total price would be ($220×12)-10%=$2,376, or $198/team/month. If you had four teams and just wanted to pay for three months, the math would be the same: you’d be paying for 12 team-months (4 teams × 3 months), and it would only be $198/team/month. If you have 12 or more teams, then you would get the quantity discount even if you pay monthly.

If you need extra submission credits beyond those that come with your monthly subscription, we offer two quantity discounts. We give you a 20% discount when you purchase 10,000 to 100,000 extra submission credits and a 50% discount when you purchase 100,000 or more credits.

If you’d like to learn more about SurveyCTO teams, please see the FAQ “What is a SurveyCTO team?”.

Team-month credits expire 12 months after they are purchased (or once your subscription has been closed for six months). They can be used flexibly at any point within that period.

Extra submission credits will remain available as long as your subscription stays active, but they will expire once your subscription has been closed for three months.

If you’d like to learn more about SurveyCTO teams, please see the FAQ “What is a SurveyCTO team?”.

We can only accept payments for up to a year of service in advance. Therefore, the maximum number of team-months that can be purchased is 12 * (current number of teams).

If you currently have a balance of unused team-months, the total amount of additional team-months you can purchase will be lower than 12 * (current number of teams). The total balance of unused team-months after your purchase, including the team-months you already had, cannot exceed 12 * (current number of teams). For example, if you have a two-team subscription, you can have a balance of, at most, 24 team-months on your subscription at any time. If you have a balance of 4 unused team-months and decide to purchase additional team-months you will be able to purchase a maximum of 20 team-months, so that the total balance after the purchase is 4 + 20 = 24 team-months.

Team-month credits that are unused 12 months from the date they are purchased, or after your subscription has been closed for six months, will automatically expire and cannot be refunded. Please do not purchase more team-months than you can actually use within that period.

If you’d like to learn more about SurveyCTO teams, please see the FAQ “What is a SurveyCTO team?”.

You can purchase as many submission credits as you need. They will remain available as long as your subscription stays active. Please note, however, that extra submission credits will automatically expire once your subscription has been closed for three months.

No. We cannot refund advance payments. Therefore we strongly advise that you only purchase as many team-months credits as you are confident you will need within the next 12 months. Extra submission credits will remain available as long as your subscription stays active, but they will expire once your subscription has been closed for three months.

However, we understand that organizational and project needs can change unpredictably. Therefore, if you underestimated your needs, we make it easy to purchase additional credits without disruption to your work.

Although team-month credits expire 12 months after they are purchased (or once your subscription has been closed for six months), they can be used at any point you want within this period. For example, if you have just purchased 6 team-months and they will not expire for another 12 months, you can close your account, return in 3 months, and continue to use the 6 remaining team-months you had already paid for rather than pay again at the time of reactivation.

If you’d like to learn more about SurveyCTO teams, please see the FAQ “What is a SurveyCTO team?”.

Team-month credits are not transferable across servers. You can add multiple teams to the same SurveyCTO server – as many teams as you want – and team-months are shared by those teams. However, each SurveyCTO server is its own account, with separate subscription management, and team-months and submission credits must be purchased for each server separately.

If you’d like to learn more about SurveyCTO teams, please see the FAQ “What is a SurveyCTO team?”.

Not at all. We have designed SurveyCTO to let you scale your subscription to match your exact needs. You can start with just a single-team subscription and add (or remove) teams as needed via your account’s manage subscription page. If you’re interested in enterprise pricing for organization-wide use, please contact us at sales@surveycto.com.

If you’d like to learn more about SurveyCTO teams, please see the FAQ “What is a SurveyCTO team?”.