Event Licenses
How Event Pro slots work, what free collaborator access includes, and how to figure out how many licenses you need.
Event licensing in BackOps is built around flexibility. Rather than purchasing a license for every single person who touches an event, you buy a number of seats — and those seats are available on every event you create.
How Event Pro Slots Work
Event Pro licenses are sold as slots, not as named seats tied to specific people. When you purchase five Event Pro licenses, you have five open seats on every event in your organization. You can staff those seats with whoever you need on each event — the same five people every time, or a completely different team.
This means you're licensing based on the capacity your events require, not the total headcount of everyone who might ever work with you.
A few things that make the slot model flexible:
- Slots work across your entire portfolio. The same five licenses cover every event you create — you don't repurchase for each one.
- You can use slots for people outside your organization. Freelancers, contractors, and clients can all be assigned an Event Pro slot. They don't need to be members of your org.
- Personal orgs can use Event Pro too. A personal organization doesn't have team org features, but you can still purchase as many Event Pro licenses as you need and bring in collaborators at the event level.
If you regularly work with freelancers, buying a couple of extra Event Pro slots gives you standing capacity to bring in whoever you need on any given show — without scrambling for access each time.
At least one Event Pro license is required to create any event, regardless of what other licenses your organization holds.
Free Collaborator Access
Not everyone working on your event needs an Event Pro license. BackOps includes a free access tier for collaborators — vendors, external teams, and freelancers who only need to interact with their own slice of the event.
Without an Event Pro license, an invited user can access the first five tabs of their assigned collaborator:
- Dashboard — an overview of their collaborator
- Tasks — tasks assigned to their collaborator
- Schedule — activities tagged to their collaborator
- Files — files in their collaborator's folder
- Advances — advance forms sent to their collaborator
By default, this access is interactive — they can read, edit, upload, download, and fully engage with everything scoped to their collaborator. For most external vendors and partners, this is everything they actually need — they're not building the event, they're responding to it.
Free collaborator access is the right fit for anyone whose work is entirely contained within a single collaborator: vendors submitting their requirements, talent teams reviewing their schedules, clients viewing documents shared with them.
If you want a collaborator to be read-only, you can configure that through permissions without changing their license. The free access tier defines what they can reach — permissions control what they can actually do with it.
Who Needs Event Pro
Event Pro is for the people who need to work across multiple collaborators — building the event rather than responding to it.
That typically means:
- Event project managers and assistant PMs
- Department leads who manage work across multiple vendors
- Anyone handling procurement, ordering, or cross-team coordination
- Anyone who needs visibility into the full event, not just one collaborator's view
If someone's entire interaction with an event is scoped to their own collaborator, free access covers it. As soon as they need to see or act on anything outside that scope, they need Event Pro.
Figuring Out How Many Licenses You Need
The right number of Event Pro licenses depends on how your team is structured and how you run events. It's not always obvious upfront, and getting it wrong in either direction costs you — too few and you're blocked, too many and you're overpaying.
Our sales team regularly works with new customers on trial periods — a short window where we provide more licenses than you expect to need at a reduced flat rate, so you can actually run some events and see where the usage lands. Maybe you thought you needed ten licenses but consistently used five. Or the reverse. Either way, you'll have real data before committing to a billing model.
Once you have a clear picture of your actual usage, we work with you to find the right ongoing plan.
If you're not sure where to start, reach out. We're happy to talk through your team structure and help you figure out what makes sense before you purchase anything.