Subscription tiers, limits, and soft lock
Carrier Stash bills at the organization level. Each organization sits on one of four tiers, and that tier sets two hard caps — how many active carriers and how many libraries the organization can have — along with which features are unlocked. This page explains how those limits are enforced and what soft lock means.
The four tiers
There are four tiers: Free, Starter, Pro, and Plus. Each is built around a different kind of library, from a single home collector on Free up to a multi-chapter network on Plus. Only active (non-archived) carriers count toward the carrier cap.
| Tier | Price | Active carriers | Libraries | Equipment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10 | 1 | 10 |
| Starter | $10/mo ($100/yr) | 30 | 1 | 10 |
| Pro | $25/mo ($250/yr) | 75 | 3 | 25 |
| Plus | $40/mo ($400/yr) | 500 | Unlimited | 150 |
Prices shown here are display values. Stripe is always authoritative for the amount actually charged, and it’s what you see at checkout. Annual billing is ten months’ price (two months free).
Features unlock as you climb: waitlists, renewals, and events arrive at Starter; advanced reporting and the Financial Tools add-on arrive at Pro. Equipment items have their own separate cap and never consume carrier slots.
How the caps are enforced
The carrier and library caps are enforced in two places at once, and both matter.
Carrier Stash checks the cap both in the form and at the database level, so the count can never be exceeded — even during a bulk import. The check in the form is what produces the friendly “your plan has room for N more” message and stops the action early; the database check is the final word, so the limit always holds.
Because the cap counts active carriers only, archiving a carrier frees a slot immediately, and restoring one from the archive re-checks the cap.
Soft lock
Soft lock is what happens when an organization is over a limit rather than merely at it. This almost always follows a downgrade or a trial ending at a lower tier — for instance an organization with 40 carriers dropping from Pro to Free, whose cap is 10.
The design goal is that an over-limit organization can keep winding down what it already has. So soft lock pauses new lending but never blocks returns or reading:
- Reading is never blocked. All carriers, caregivers, loans, and reports stay visible.
- Check-in and returns always work. Returned carriers can be received and loans closed at any time.
- Renewals keep working if the current tier includes them. Renewing a loan is a Starter-and-up feature; being over the limit doesn’t change that either way (a Free org has no renewals regardless).
- Reservations and the waitlist stay available — you can still reserve a carrier, add a waitlist entry (new entries need Starter or above, as always), and clear existing ones.
What soft lock blocks is new lending and growth: starting a new check-out (on any carrier, including ones already owned), adding carriers, and creating libraries, until the organization is back under its limit or upgrades. Getting back under the limit — by archiving active carriers — lifts the block, as does upgrading to a tier whose caps cover current usage. A warning is shown before a downgrade or trial expiry that would trigger this state.