@Andy777 - You could create a Team Plan team and only purchase paid seats/licenses for those who will be creating boards and facilitating sessions. The rest of the users could choose to create a free Miro account and access the boards as “guest editors” or they could access the boards as “anonymous guest editors” which are users who do not have a Miro account at all.

You can read more about Guest Editor access in the Collaboration with Anonymous Guest Editors Help Center article.

As per the above article, something to keep in mind is there will be some limitations for guest editors, the majority of which will likely not be an issue:

How Guests Appear While on the Board

As you may know already, when registered users are on a board together, participants account profile name shows up in the participants panel and beside their cursor:

At the moment, most guests will have random guest names assigned to them while they are on the board, e.g., Guest Mironeer, Guest Artisan, Guest Maker:

However, there is a Wish List idea post on this forum for a feature to allow guests to name themselves that is currently in beta. Usually Miro doesn’t mention beta features publicly as they are subject to change, however, they have tagged the Wish List post as “BETA” and their competitors already have this feature, so I think it’s safe to say it is definitely going to happen - check out this post for more info:

https://community.miro.com/wish-list-32/allow-anonymous-board-editors-to-rename-themselves-for-the-duration-of-a-session-808

Reasons to create a free Miro account vs. accessing boards as an anonymous guest

Because non-team members/guests won’t see the paid team you have created when they sign in tot their accounts, they would have to rely on accessing the board from the link you share with them, e.g., they may bookmark it in their browser, refer to an email or meeting invite. However, if they have a Miro account, they can click on the star icon beside the board name and then access the board again from the Starred boards page in their dashboard - NOTE: If you change the board’s Share settings from Anyone with the link to No access, the board will disappear from their Starred boards page and they will no longer be able to access it, even if they try the direct link that you shared with them.

Creating a Free account (and a Free Plan team in the process)

After trying Miro, some users may want to explore Miro on their own. When creating their account, they may be prompted to join an existing team - this can happen if someone else with a private domain email address already has a Miro team created with the same email address as them, e.g., bob@somedomain.com created a Miro team and has the permissions set to allow the team to be discoverable by anyone with an @somedomain.com email address, e.g:

So, jill@somedomain.com creates a free Miro account and during the process they see a screen like this:

I like to suggest that everyone uses the Create a new team option. Why? So they have their own free plan team. If they join an existing one, they will be on a team with other members and if this is a Free Plan team, the “3 editable boards” limit may have been reached and they can’t create their own board.

If they need to join an existing team, they can also do this after-the-fact by asking a member of that team to invite them.

More on the Free Plan team here: https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017730373-Free-Plan

Permissions - Inviting to the team and default board and project sharing

A few other settings I would suggest looking at are the Invitation settings:

With that setting enabled, an Invite link to Board and Team option appears in the boards’ Share settings:

If a paid member on your team sends a non-team member that link, the recipient could be added to your team as a paid member (if there are unused licenses available).

When I disable the option, here’s what the Share settings looks like:

You can read more about this in the Invitation Settings Help Center article:

https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360022258119-Invitation-Settings

Default Project and Board sharing options

You may want to consider settings the team permissions Default Board and Project settings to “Only owners can access”. Here is a copy-and-paste from another post where I explained this detail:

Default Board and Project permission settings

I just finished sending this information to someone else. Essentially what you'll want to do in your Team profiling settings is to set the default sharing for newly created Boards and Projects so that only the creator can access them. This is important for a number of reasons, including:

1. Only the person creating the board/project can see it and therefore it remains private until it is explicitly shared with someone(s); and
2. it avoids "clutter" in people's dashboards (imagine you add, say, 50 students and each of them creates two projects and three boards!

To set this up:

1. From your dashboard, click on the team settings gear icon
2. Click on Permissions
3. Scroll down to Sharing settings
4. Set "Default settings for board sharing" and "Project sharing settings" to Only board/project owners can access:

I thought that perhaps Miro may have already changed the default settings to the above, however from what you’re telling me, it doesn’t appear they have.

Projects (and using them like “folders”)

You can set a folder to be visible or hidden to other team members. If hidden, any boards in that project will also be hidden, UNLESS you have either added members to the project OR you have added a member at the board level (more on that later):

Use case:

• You need to work on a few boards with Tim and Sally on an initiative called “Marketing team system upgrade”, so you create a project called Marketing team system upgrade
• You then open that project and make use “Anyone in your team can view this project” is DISABLED
• You click on Add members and add Tim and Sally and give them Edit access.
• Now Tim and Sally will see that project in their Miro dashboard and any boards that you add to that project.
• If a new team member needs to work on those boards with you, Tim, and Sally, you just add them to the project and now they can see all of those boards.

Another use case: You may a project called Achim, set “Anyone in your team can view this project” is DISABLED, and keep your private boards in their. Except there is one board in there that your manger needs to see, so you open that board, select Share, and add your manager here:

Board Sharing permissions

Before I try to answer all of your questions, I will break down the Free Plan roles and types of access to a board in the Free Plan and moving forward I will simply refer to these and Team and Public. You can find these settings in a board’s Share settings from either inside of the board or by using the ellipsis “three-dots” menu:

First, let’s talk about the options available at the Team level:

1. Can view - Any member of the Free Plan team (either Team Admin or Member - the only two roles) can view the board in read-only mode - they will not be able to edit it - only the board owner (the person who created the board) will still be able to edit the board.

2. Can comment - Now any team member can view the board, add new comments to objects that did not already have comments, as well as add additional comments to existing comments.

3. Can edit -  This is the default setting of newly created boards in a Free Plan.

4. No access - aka, Private Boards ← as this Miro Help Center article states, and as does the help bubble in the above screenshot, private boards are not allowed in the Free Plan.

Public board access:

NOTE: “Anyone” really means anyone - they don’t even need to have a Miro account:

1. Can view - Again, anyone with the link can only view the board.

2. Can comment - Similar to the Team-level setting, anyone with the link can create & add new comments.

3. Can edit - This option is not available for Free Plans. Only team members can edit the board. Public edit access to a Miro board is for paid plans only. This feature is commonly referred to as Guest Editor access - check out this article → Collaboration with Anonymous Guest Editors. It is also worth noting that paid plans can also password protect public boards.

No access - This is the default setting and as it sounds means there is no public access allowed to the board.

Is the pricing in USD? https://miro.com/app/?createTeamPlan the $ figure per user mentioned here, is it in USD?

We will be using a purchase card to pay, and would need to pay in AUD. 

I believe that Miro always show US dollars (USD) for all of the prices, regardless of your country of origin.

If you are seeing the same prices as I am when I go to https://miro.com/pricing/, when you are seeing USD:

I started the upgrade process for one of my Free Plan teams and see that Miro’s payment provider, Stripe, does not appear to specify the currency - they really should.

Yes they should mention USD. I have reached our to Miro support seeking an invoice for 20 users team plan - AUD amount. 

I have 2 Miro IDs and have tried very hard to keep them separate

1 through my work client (I am not the account owner) and 1 consultant license (I paid for 1 seat)

Somehow the accounts have become crossed - I organized the board I want on my consultant license (paid I believe) and “left” the work client team with my consultant ID.

I am now trying to send a link to my consultant board to 2 people and I got an email to the work account (which I had tried to disconnect from this consultant board entirely), to approve the edit access for the people I was inviting?   Is there anyone who can take a look at these accounts and advise me.    

I imagine I will be helping my client with licensing in the future and purchasing more myself but I need to have 2 separate disconnected environments.   

This would be a question for Miro support. You can open a ticket by following the instructions in this article:

https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020185799-How-to-contact-Miro-Support#h_01F010RXA0E1S9C0WFQYX75R6C