A first team rarely has a people system. It has a spreadsheet, a shared admin login, and one person who remembers who was given what. Starter moves all of that into a free workspace with a record for every person.
What Starter covers
Starter is the free plan for small teams. It includes:
- A people directory, with one record per person
- Access grants by role
- Admin, manager, and staff roles
- A hosted careers page
- Email support
You do not need all of it at once. The directory works on its own, and the rest can follow.
A login for each person
Shared logins are where small teams lose track. When five people sign in to the same account, nobody can say who changed what, and removing one person means resetting the password for everyone.
In Folkbase, every person has a record in the directory and is invited to sign in as themselves, with a role that fits their work:
- Admins run the workspace, its members, access, and settings.
- Managers see their own team.
- Staff see their own access and can request more.
Access belongs to a person, not to a password passed around.
Access, written down by role
A role template lists the tools a role should have. An engineer might get GitHub, Jira, and Slack. A designer might get Notion, Slack, and Google Workspace. Apply the template and each tool becomes a grant on the person's record.
A grant holds one tool, its scope, who granted it, the role or request that justifies it, and its state: pending, active, suspended, or revoked. When someone asks who has GitHub, the answer is on the records, not in a group chat. The grants page covers the model in detail.
On Starter, grants are your record of who should have what. Opening and closing the accounts inside each tool comes with integrations on Growth.
Your first setup
- Add your people. Each one becomes a record.
- Create teams and set each person's manager.
- Write a role template for each kind of job you have today.
- Apply the templates so every person's access is on their record.
- Invite everyone. Records start as Pending invite.
- Publish the careers page so open roles have a link and an apply flow.
Only the first step is required. Each later step adds to records you already have.
When to add Growth
Starter fits while hiring is occasional. These are signs it is time for more:
- Someone joins most months, and the onboarding checklist lives in a doc.
- Offboarding depends on one person remembering every tool.
- Applications arrive through the careers page, then sit in an inbox.
- You want Slack or Google Workspace accounts to open and close from Folkbase.
- A customer asks when access was last reviewed, and nobody knows.
Growth covers each of these in the same workspace, so your records, teams, and role templates carry over. Pricing lists each plan, and growing teams shows how those modules fit together.