Common users vs. Client Users vs. Freelancers

Dear Zoho Projects Team,

We've started exploring Zoho Projects again and got an issue with licensing/pricing and freelancers (users who works freelance).

That's a very common situation nowadays when you hire external users (freelancers) to do some work for your projects. They can be designers, programmers, writers and so on. They are not part of your organization, they are not even contractors. Usually, they do small work, 2-5 hours at all for a particular task, get paid and disappear.

So, usually that happens in that way:

1. You have many customers with many projects for each.

2. You have a team of professionals inside your organization (for example, programmers and devops), each of them have a Zoho One license, for example, so he can have access to various Zoho apps.

3. For a particular project of a particular customer you need to hire some freelancers, for example, graphic designers or technical writers.

4. However, current Zoho Projects pricing model requires you to buy a Zoho One license for EACH freelancer to be able to participate in a project, comment on tasks and so on.

5. That's very expensive and inconvenient, because every time (for every new project) there will be DIFFERENT users.

6. So even if you buy some licenses for the first project, finish it and want to start the second project with new freelancers, you will have either to buy even more licenses or delete previous freelancers and their licenses and buy new ones and activate them.

7. That leads to very expensive working in Zoho Projects. For example, just 5 freelancers will cost us 35 EUR * 5 +21% VAT = 211 EUR. And these 5 freelancers with just have 5 simple tasks for them, where they will leave few comments. And that's all!

8. And i'm afraid if we then delete first 5 freelancers, something bad will happen to tasks/milestones where they worked.

9. For sure, we can name them universally, say "freelancer01", "freelancer02" and then just change passwords and give the credentials to the new freelancers. But that's very annoying and even more, we will have to change their permissions every time, because freelancers for the seconds project must not have access to the first project and its tasks.

I found many similar questions/requests on this forum, other your customers also do not want to suffer from this pricing model of Zoho Projects.

As a workaround you suggested to add those freelancers as Client users. That works, right.

BUT, suddenly i realized that Cient users can not log hours they worked on a task (that's the only thing we want them to do in Zoho Projects, so we will pay them for their hours; in other words, the most important thing is not possible) and they can't participate in built-in Chat, so we have to use external chats like WhatsApp/Viber/etc. They also might have some other restrictions, we just do not know that for sure.

So please do something with that. Either add new type of user, which will be really cheap or just allow Client users to log hours and participate in Chats (for money, if you really need that), whatever.

Thank you.

P.S. If you need, i will send you URLs to the posts accross this forum, where your customers ask for the same.

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