Can't invite more team members
What to do when you hit the seat limit on your Ordinary plan — how seats are counted, why pending invites use one, and how to free a seat or upgrade.
Written by The Ordinary Team · Updated On this page
If you try to invite a teammate and see “Seat limit reached” with a count like (5/5) and “Upgrade your plan to add more team members”, your plan’s seat cap is full.
Seat limits by plan
- Free — 1 seat.
- Starter — 5 seats.
- Advanced — unlimited.
- Enterprise — per contract (usually unlimited).
Seats include both active members and pending invitations. Declining or revoking a pending invite frees a seat.
When you have more members than seats
If your organization has more members than your plan allows (for example after moving to a smaller plan, or when an Advanced trial ends), members keep their seats in the order they joined. Anyone who joined after the limit was reached has their access paused: they see a message explaining why, and can’t open the organization’s data until it’s resolved. In Settings → Team they’re marked Access paused.
Access returns on its own as soon as you either upgrade to a plan with enough seats or remove members so everyone fits. Nothing is deleted while access is paused.
If you’re an admin whose own access is paused, you can still open Settings → Billing to upgrade, and Settings → Team to remove members whose access is also paused or to cancel and resend pending invitations. Members who have access can only be changed by an admin whose access isn’t paused.
What to do
Option 1 — free up a seat
- Go to Settings → Team.
- Review the list of current members and pending invitations.
- Remove anyone who no longer needs access: click the trash icon (Remove user) on their row and confirm. For a pending invitation, click its ✕ icon (Cancel invitation).
- Try the invitation again.
This is a good idea regardless — inactive admins are a security risk.
Option 2 — upgrade your plan
If you genuinely need more seats, upgrading is the direct fix:
- Free → Starter: 1 seat → 5 seats.
- Starter → Advanced: 5 seats → unlimited.
See Upgrading your plan. Upgrades are effective immediately and your new seat allowance is available within a minute.
On Starter — who counts toward the 5
All active users, regardless of role (Org Admin, Creatives User or Reports User), including the person who installed Ordinary. Plus:
- Pending invitations waiting for the invitee to accept.
Single Sign-On (SSO) is an Enterprise feature — on Starter, every user needs their own invited account.
Service accounts
If you’re creating a “tools” user for automation (e.g. a finance tool reading data via our API), each one counts as a seat.
If you need programmatic access without using a seat, Enterprise plans include API tokens that don’t count. Email sales@tryordinary.com.