Hi @Andrea de Wattignar - For starters, I really like and appreciate the level of detail you have used to explain your situation.

When it comes to Day Passes and their cost, Miro should limit the maximum a team is charged to the monthly price of the plan for which they are being consumed within. This would be a more  customer focused approach. Those are my thoughts on Day Passes.

While I have never been on a Business Plan, I can appreciate the challenges/concerns you have laid out. I will try to answer what I can.

“How can I enable anyone in our organisation to join our account as a Free Occasional user, without them automatically being assigned a Day Pass?”

There are no free users in paid plans (only the Free Plan). In a paid plan, you can add non-team member users at the board level for free, but only in View or Comment only mode.

“We also have SSO integrated” and “employees who are discovering that Miro is available and want to try it out”

Having not been an Admin on a Team/Business/Enterprise Plan and having no experience with SSO in Miro, I’m not sure if this would even work, but to avoid licence/join requests for the Free Plan we started with in my organization, I did make the following change under Permissions > Team signup mode in our Free Plan (and see that it is available in my Consultant Plan):

Making this change stopped the scenario where

• someone in my organization who was creating a new Miro account using their work email address would be presented with a number of teams that already exists
• then they would try to join one of those teams.

I’m not sure if there is an option in your Business Plan’s Permissions or SSO settings that is similar to the above, but if there was a way to force people to create their own Miro account with their work email address, that could help you address the next question:

What happens if I switch Day Passes off? How do board owners otherwise enable collaborators to edit within our organisation?

This can be done, but there are a number of considerations. If board owners need to pull in others from within the organization to be able to edit boards, they could share a link to the board as a Guest Editor - the board could also password protect. For the user who is going to use this shared link as a non-paid team member in your Business Plan, they would receive the link and use the password to enter the board. When the user loads the board, they could “star” it using the star icon located to the right of the board name. When they come back to their Miro dashboard and click on “Stared”, the board link would be there for them - no need to go find it in an email somewhere.

Pros (and cons) of this approach:

• The users accessing the board with the Guest Editor link wouldn’t even need to have a Miro account (but you wouldn’t see their name beside their cursor when they are on the board, and they will need to keep track of board links that they are editing).
• It is free (when users aren’t consuming Day Passes, i.e., are not on the team all, and therefore can’t create boards that can be seen by people who do have paid seats on the team.
• Those are just a few…

But back to SSO - I don’t even know how this works in Miro and if there is a way for it to be set up in such a way that, e.g., a user in your organization can go to miro.com and create their own account with a company email address and a password, creating their own Free Plan team during that process. If so, then they would have their own Miro account to play with and could still be invited to edit boards by current paid team members who are board owners and need those other users to collaborate on boards.

I hope at least some of that made sense and helps in some way.

No insight to offer (another - consultant plan’ user)

First thanx for posting - awareness of the ways to get bitten - and thus workflows to avoid - is important to the community

I  100% agree that charging via day passes more than a month’s standard cost (perhaps with a slight ‘more admin’ uplift) is not customer oriented. My term would be “immoral” - It was actually an immediate fear I had when I skim read those parts of the blurb on the website

Seems to be a legit reason to raise a ticket and ask for an account management person from Miro to respond directly in person - Maybe @Marina  can advise and connect you to whoever owns the sales & account management function? 

Last though in @Rob Johnson screen shot is an option “discoverable...permission” - I guess the need is to shift this ‘up’ a level from join a board to join an account?

@Simon.Harris - Good point re the slight Day Pass “uplift” as an “incentive” to just pay for a full license.

@Andrea de Wattignar - Coincidentally, another post I was subscribed to re “Full members or Free non-team users” received a reply early this morning from a Miro employee. I wasn’t even aware Miro was using the term “Free users” outside of Free Plans - it gets a bit confusing. After searching the Miro Help Center for “Free non-team user”, I came across the following article that may be useful in any future plan-type/setup change decisions: Account Access Levels.

@Simon.Harris and @Rob Johnson have done a great job of summarizing the particulars of pricing options so all I’ll add is how we’ve attacked the problem.

As a teaching company we run multiple short (1-3 day courses) each month. Buying day passes for each individual learner would get costly really quickly and we didn’t want to use anonymous guest editor access for a variety of reasons. We also needed everyone to have full edit capabilities.

Because we are billed on a monthly Consultant plan, we use the approach of just purchasing enough licenses for that month to cover the maximum number of learners we will have in a single day. Then, once one class is done, we transfer those licenses over to other learners for subsequent courses within the same month. This approach works out to be a lot cheaper than individual day passes.

Kiron

I agree - this is really getting out of hand. A more suitable model would be that of Slack or Expensify - you can have as many users as you want but only “active” ones will be charged if they actually used the system during the month.

Then it would be awesome if it would just charge day passes until it reaches the monthly cost and caps it there. 

@Kiron Bondale we are in a similar situation but we add everyone as anonymous users. However, we also have longer-term initiatives where someone will be using Miro with us over the course of 3-6 months and those we add as day pass users. Some of those participants will access a board 1-2 each month whereas some others actually go in 13-14 times but we don’t know upfront. So I’ve regularly paid for 10+ day passes before remembering to go in and check and converting to full team members. And don’t get me started on sub-contractors or vendors… they get added to Miro with email domains I don’t recognize and then I have to hunt down why they are consuming day passes on our account. Really wish Miro would do something about this… 

@Rob Johnson thank you! I appreciate your thoughtful and thorough response. I switched the Team signup mode over to “Invitation Only” immediately; this should at least reduce curious bypassers and make it easier for me to match users to actual boards. 

With the SSO, it was a requirement of our company’s cyber-security team in order to get Miro approved for use. We are considered an essential services company with a high cyber attack risk so it’s par for the course for us. 

@Kiron Bondale thank you also. In hindsight we should have promoted Anonymous Guest Editors from the beginning, but in our desire for transparent collaboration we wanted everyone to be seen. I’m not sure now if someone in our company signing in with SSO even has the option to be anonymous? @Marina would you have insight into this?  

Also @Kiron Bondale, your approach makes me consider switching off Day Passes and directing people to request a Full licence - that we could agree who is paying and set some expectations up front, as well as transfer licences when people have finished using Miro. To go down this path I’d have to revisit accessibility and user experience; if I make it too hard for people to access it, they won’t use it.  

@andyvdg I agree…

A more suitable model would be that of Slack or Expensify - you can have as many users as you want but only “active” ones will be charged if they actually used the system during the month.

Then it would be awesome if it would just charge day passes until it reaches the monthly cost and caps it there. 

And @Simon.Harris I like your idea too..

Last though in @Rob Johnson screen shot is an option “discoverable...permission” - I guess the need is to shift this ‘up’ a level from join a board to join an account?

This would be a great feature to add, and at least allow these people to view boards that have been made public, including the sandpit board I intend to build that helps new users have a play around and use some of the features. 

Thank you all for your responses. It’s a conversation I’d like to continue and welcome the Miro support team to work with us to create more flexible administration options. 

Cheers All

I think this is another area that would benefit from some a rationalising 

Yesterday I was invited to a board owned by a free account holder and the whole process of access was opaque - I ended up using incognito and a ‘burner’ free account 

Has anyone read all the documentation on the access paths and could summarise it to the available work-flows? - I haven’t 

+1 on a more reasonable solution here. I’d LOVE to broadcast this to clients, but am concerned about the cost exposure of having them log in more than 4x in a month (and up to 20-31 24hr periods per month).

Even if it was limited to 150% of the “full user” cost, I’d be good with it … and the bonus is that it really encourages engagement (for more prospective customers for Miro!)