Roles & permissions
Owner, Admin, Billing, Member and Viewer — what each can do, how to change a role, and how to transfer ownership.
Every member of an organization carries one role that controls what they can read and change. StatusOwl ships with five roles, in order of decreasing privilege: Owner, Admin, Billing, Member, Viewer.
This page is the canonical capability matrix. To invite a teammate into your org, see Inviting your team.
The five roles
| Role | Short description |
|---|---|
| Owner | The founder of the org. Full access including billing and org deletion. There is exactly one Owner per org. |
| Admin | Manage monitors, integrations, status pages, members, and billing. Cannot delete the organization or change its Owner. |
| Billing | Manage subscription, payment method, and invoices. Roles are ranked, so Billing also carries everything a Member can do. Cannot manage members. |
| Member | Manage monitors, integrations, and status pages. Cannot manage members or billing. |
| Viewer | Read-only access to dashboards. |
Capability matrix
| Capability | Owner | Admin | Billing | Member | Viewer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View dashboards | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Create / edit / delete monitors | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Toggle monitor maintenance mode | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Configure integrations | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Create / edit / delete status pages | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Open / update incidents | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Invite or remove members | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Change member roles | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Manage subscription / payment / invoices | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — | — |
| View audit logs | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Manage API keys | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Edit organization settings | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Delete the organization | ✓ | — | — | — | — |
| Transfer ownership | ✓ | — | — | — | — |
Role enforcement is hierarchical. The enforced rule is the rank order Owner > Admin > Billing > Member > Viewer: a role clears any check a lower role clears. Billing outranks Member, so a Billing member can also do everything a Member can — create monitors, configure integrations, open incidents. The Billing role exists for finance team members who need invoices and payment access, but it is not a read-only role outside billing. If you want someone who cannot change anything, use Viewer.
If a check is unclear in practice, the rule of thumb is: Admins can do everything except delete the org; Members can do everything except manage members and billing.
Inviting and changing roles
Open Organization → Members to:
- Invite — pick a role at invite time. The invitee receives an email; once they accept, they appear with the assigned role.
- Change role — open the role dropdown next to a member, pick a new role, save. Takes effect immediately.
- Remove — take a member out of the organization. Their access is revoked immediately. Removing a member does not delete anything they created — monitors, status pages and integrations all stay.
The current Owner cannot have their role changed from this page — see Transferring ownership below.
Transferring ownership
There is exactly one Owner per organization. To hand the org over to someone else:
- Make sure the new Owner is a member of the org with at least Admin role.
- As the current Owner, open Organization → Settings.
- Click Transfer ownership, pick the target member, and confirm.
- The target member becomes the new Owner. You drop to Admin by default — change yourself to Member or remove yourself afterward if you want a clean handoff.
Transfer is immediate. There is no "pending acceptance" step from the new Owner's side.
Once ownership is transferred, the new Owner has full control — including the ability to remove the old Owner. Make sure you trust them before transferring.
Switching organizations
A user can belong to multiple organizations. Switch between them with the org picker in the top-left of the sidebar — your role can be different in each org. The selected org is sticky across sessions; the URL also encodes it.
Seats per plan
| Plan | Members |
|---|---|
| Free | 2 |
| Starter | 8 |
| Growth | 25 |
| Scale | Unlimited |
The current count against the limit is shown at the top of Organization → Members. Pending invitations hold a seat until accepted or revoked; removing a member or revoking an invitation frees one immediately.
How isolation actually works
Data is scoped by organization, and that scoping is enforced in application code — every read and every write checks your membership and role in the organization that owns the record before it runs. It is not row-level security in the database. If you are evaluating StatusOwl against a compliance requirement, that is the accurate description; treat any claim of "isolated at the database level" as wrong.
What is not available
- No API for member management. Inviting, removing and changing roles are dashboard-only. There is no endpoint, and the API is read-only in any case.
- No SSO, SAML or SCIM. Sign-in is email and password with session cookies. SSO is on the roadmap and has never shipped, despite an earlier version of the StatusOwl website listing SAML as a paid feature.
- No custom roles. The five above are the whole set.
See also
- Inviting your team — the invite flow, role-at-invite-time selection.
- Audit logs — every role change shows up here.
- Billing — what the Billing role can actually do in the Stripe portal.