Managing Multiple Projects with Collective Billing and User Inheritance
If you need to manage several projects, you can streamline billing and user management using collective billing and user inheritance.
How to Add Multiple Projects to a Collective Bill
When you subscribe your first project (which must be at least on the Growth or Usage-Based plan), you can add additional projects to the same collective bill.
This means each project still needs to be subscribed to a plan, but you can group them under one collective bill for simplified invoicing.
Inheriting Users Across Projects
Locize allows you to inherit users from your main/parent (collective billing) project to other projects. This can be managed in two ways:
- On the parent project: enable "Inherit users on children" to push users to all child projects automatically.
- On each child project: enable "Inherit users from parent" to pull users from the parent project. (If the parent has "Inherit users on children" enabled, this is forced on automatically.)
This also works for multi-tenant setups — tenant (child) projects can inherit users from the parent project.
How Inherited Users Appear in the UI
Once inheritance is enabled, the child project's Users page shows each user with a status badge:
- "INHERITED" badge — the user comes from the parent project through inheritance.
- "OVERRIDDEN" badge — the user was inherited but their role was customized in this specific child project.
- No badge — the user was directly added to this child project (not inherited).
How User Inheritance Affects Billing
This is the key point for cost optimization:
Inherited users do NOT count toward a child project's user limit for billing purposes.
Only users who are directly assigned to a project (or who have been overridden) count toward that project's user limit. This means:
- A child project with 30 inherited users and 2 directly added users has a billed user count of 2 — not 32.
- This allows child projects (including tenant projects) to use lower-tier plans (like Starter with 5 users) even when many users have access through inheritance.
Overridden users count as direct users
If you override an inherited user's role in a child project (e.g., changing them from admin to translator in that specific project), they become an overridden user and do count toward the child's user limit.
To revert an overridden user back to inherited status (and stop them from counting), click the three-dot menu (⋮) on that user and select "INHERIT".
Optimizing Costs with User Inheritance
If your child projects (or tenant projects) have many directly assigned users who also have access via the parent, you can reduce costs by:
- Enable inheritance: On the parent project, go to Users and enable "Inherit users on children". Or on each child, enable "Inherit users from parent".
- Remove direct assignments: In each child project, look for users without the "INHERITED" badge. If they also exist on the parent project, remove them from the child — they'll still have access through inheritance.
- Revert unnecessary overrides: For users with the orange "OVERRIDDEN" badge, ask whether they actually need a custom role in this specific project. If not, click "INHERIT" to revert them.
- Downgrade child plans: After cleanup, if the remaining direct user count is low enough, you may be able to move child projects to a lower-tier plan.
Key Points
- Each project must be subscribed to a plan, but you can add multiple projects to one collective bill.
- User access can be inherited (and customized) across projects within a collective billing group.
- Inherited users do not count toward a child project's user limit for billing.
- Overridden users do count — revert them to "inherit" if the custom role isn't needed.
- Enable inheritance on the parent to automatically give all child projects access to the parent's users.