Roles explained

Ochre has four roles: Owner, Admin, Agent, and Light agent. This article is the reference matrix. If you are deciding who to invite as what, also read Inviting your team.

The short version

| Capability | Owner | Admin | Agent | Light agent | |---|---|---|---|---| | Reply to customers | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | | Read conversations | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Internal notes and @mentions | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Assign, snooze, close | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | | Edit AI guardrails and spend caps | Yes | Yes | No | No | | Manage channels and integrations | Yes | Yes | No | No | | Manage routing and SLA | Yes | Yes | No | No | | Publish help center articles | Yes | Yes | Draft only | No | | Invite and remove teammates | Yes | Yes | No | No | | See AI spend reports | Yes | Yes | No | No | | Manage billing and invoices | Yes | No | No | No | | Transfer ownership | Yes | No | No | No | | Delete workspace | Yes | No | No | No | | Billable | Yes | Yes | Yes | Free |

Owner

Owners have unrestricted access. There is at least one owner per workspace and there can be more. Most teams keep this to 1 or 2 people: a founder and the head of support.

Use owner for:

• The person paying the bill.
• The person who can legally bind the company on data agreements.
• A backup so the workspace is not stranded if one person leaves.

To hand off the role, see Transfer ownership. Owners are billable.

Admin

Admins run support operations. They can configure everything except the billing relationship and the destructive workspace actions. This is the role for:

• Support leads and managers.
• Ops folks who own routing, SLA, and AI configuration.
• Whoever owns the help center.

Admins can publish articles, edit AI guardrails, set spend caps, manage integrations, and invite teammates. They cannot delete the workspace or change the credit card.

Agent

Agents handle the queue. They can read every conversation, reply, assign, snooze, and close. They can author knowledge base articles in draft, but only admins or owners can publish.

Agents have full access to:

• The shared inbox and all filters.
• Customer 360 with Stripe and HubSpot context.
• The AI playground for testing prompts.
• Internal notes and mentions.
• Their own notification preferences.

Agents cannot:

• Connect or disconnect integrations.
• Edit routing rules or SLA policies.
• See workspace-wide AI spend.
• Invite teammates.

This is the role for the bulk of your support team.

Light agent

Light agents are read-only collaborators. They are free — not billable. Use them generously.

A light agent can:

• Read any conversation in the workspace.
• Leave internal notes.
• Be mentioned and respond in the thread internally.
• See customer 360.

A light agent cannot:

• Send anything to customers.
• Change conversation status, assignment, or tags.
• Edit any settings.
• Edit knowledge base articles.

The point is to bring engineers, PMs, designers, and executives into the loop without paying per seat. Engineers can answer "is this a known bug?" inside the conversation. PMs can read voice-of-customer feedback directly. The threshold for adding a stakeholder should be very low.

How conversations look across roles

Every role sees the same conversation view, but action buttons change. Light agents see "Add internal note" where agents see "Reply." The AI draft is visible to everyone but only billable roles can send it.

Permission edge cases

A few things worth knowing:

• Mentions cross roles. An agent can @mention a light agent and vice versa. The mention shows up in the recipient's inbox under the Mentions filter. See Mentions.
• Light agents can use the AI playground in read-only mode. They can test prompts but cannot save changes. See AI playground.
• Author attribution is preserved when a light agent later becomes an agent. Their old internal notes still attribute to them.
• Removing a billable role drops your seat count for the next billing cycle, prorated. See Changing your plan.

Choosing a default role for invites

When you batch-invite a list of emails, all of them get the same role. Pick the lowest role that lets the person do their job and promote later if needed. The most common mistake is inviting an engineer as an agent and paying for a seat they will never use to send a reply. Light agent is the right call.

Next steps

• Inviting your team — the invite flow.
• Roles permissions — deeper settings reference.
• Transfer ownership — handing off the workspace.