Invites, roles, and who sees what

Adding someone to Lodos takes about twenty seconds. The part worth thinking about is what they see in the first minute after they accept, because that minute decides whether they come back tomorrow.

How an invite actually works

Invitations live in the Collaborators module. You enter an email address, pick a role, and Lodos sends a message with a link. Three things happen behind that link depending on who the person is:

• They already have a Lodos account. The workspace appears in their selector immediately after they accept. No new password, no second account.
• They don't have an account. They sign up, and the workspace is waiting for them the moment they land. The invite is bound to the email address, so signing up with a different address quietly leaves them outside.
• They ignore it. The invitation sits in a pending state and shows up in your Collaborators list as unaccepted. It does not expire on its own.

That middle case is where nearly every "I never got the invite" ticket comes from. The person signed up with their personal Gmail while you invited their work address. Check the pending list before you check the spam folder theory.

Roles, in plain terms

Lodos keeps roles deliberately coarse. There is no thirty-checkbox permission matrix, and after watching teams use both kinds, that is the right call — granular permissions get configured once, wrongly, and never revisited.

Admin can add and remove people, rename the workspace, change which modules are visible, and delete things permanently. Keep this to two people.

Member can do the work: create and edit tasks, upload files, log time, run automations, join meetings. This is the correct role for almost everyone, including senior people. Seniority is not a permission level.

Guest sees only what has been shared with them explicitly. This is the role for a client, a contractor on one project, or an auditor. A guest does not see the member directory, which matters more than it sounds — a client should not be able to enumerate your team.

On top of roles, Collaborators has project-level access. A member of the workspace can still be restricted to two of your nine projects. Use it sparingly; the more you fence things off, the more time you spend answering "can you send me that, I can't see it".

The order that works

People form an opinion of a tool in the first screen. An empty workspace reads as "nothing is happening here", and that impression is surprisingly hard to reverse.

So before you invite anyone:

1. Create at least one board in Task Management with real tasks on it — not "Test task 1".
2. Upload the three or four files people will actually ask for. The brand kit, the current contract, the deck.
3. Post one message in Social Hive that says what this workspace is for and what you want people to do first.
4. Hide the modules nobody will open this month.

Then invite, in one batch rather than one at a time. A batch produces a small burst of activity that makes the place feel alive; drip-feeding invites over a week produces four separate people each opening a silent room.

What a new member sees first

Worth knowing so you can predict the questions: a new member lands on the workspace dashboard with the module sidebar on the left, and their notification centre is empty. They see boards they have access to, files they have access to, and the member directory unless they are a guest.

They do not see: your personal workspace, anything in your private Notebook, time entries logged before they joined in projects they cannot access, or archived items.

The one that catches people out is history in Social Hive. A new member can read the channel back to its beginning. If you have been using a channel for candid discussion about the person you are about to invite, move that conversation before you send the invite. There is no "hide history from new members" switch, and asking for one is usually a sign the conversation belonged in a different channel.

What it costs

Invitations require a paid plan on your side — Basic at $30 per user per month, or Pro at $99. The free Standard plan is genuinely full-featured but single-player: all thirty modules, 250,000 AI tokens a month, 1 GB of storage, no invites.

The part that is easy to miss: the person you invite does not need to pay. Someone on the free plan can accept your invitation and work in your workspace normally. You are buying the seat, not them. For agencies this changes the maths considerably — your clients cost you nothing extra to include as guests.

Removing someone

Removing a member from Collaborators revokes access immediately, including any open session. What they created stays: their tasks, their files, their time entries, their messages. This is deliberate. A project should not lose its history because someone changed jobs.

Two things to do on the same day, because both are easy to forget:

Reassign the tasks that were assigned to them. Unassigned tasks do not surface in anyone's list and quietly rot at the bottom of a column.

Check the automations. An automation created by someone who has left keeps running, but anything in it that depended on their access will start failing silently. Automation shows the owner on each flow — sort by it once after any departure.