# Sharing a plan

Plans are private until you share them. Who can see one, who can edit it, and the one link that sits outside the rules.



Readers can comment, reply and suggest edits on documents they can access. Editors can accept
changes where they maintain the source, and can use an available plan agent without owning the
plan. A copied discussion link preserves the plan's access rules. See
[Comments and suggested edits](/docs/comments-and-suggestions).

**A plan is private to whoever created it.** Nobody else in your workspace can see it, including
owners, until it is shared.

That is the default because a half-written plan is a draft, and a draft that everyone can read is a
draft nobody writes honestly.

## Three ways a plan is visible [#three-ways-a-plan-is-visible]

|                                 | Who can see it                               |
| ------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------- |
| **Private**                     | You, plus anyone you share it with.          |
| **Team**                        | Everyone in the workspace.                   |
| **Shared with specific people** | The teammates you name, as viewer or editor. |

Sharing works on the **top-level** plan and covers its whole sub-plan tree. You do not share
sub-plans one by one.

## Open Share on a sub-plan and it sends you up [#open-share-on-a-sub-plan-and-it-sends-you-up]

Because the settings belong to the plan above it, a sub-plan has none of its own to show. Share
there tells you the current access, says sharing is managed on the parent plan, and gives you one
button to open the plan that controls it. There are no controls to touch, so you cannot change the
whole tree from a screen that looks like it is about one branch.

On a top-level plan the dialog names how many active sub-plans the settings cover before you touch
anything: "these settings apply to X and its 3 active sub-plans". Archived sub-plans are not
counted, because they are not in your plan list either; the sharing settings still reach them, and
so does any public prototype link they hold.

`plansmith share` and the API say the same thing: every sharing response carries a sentence naming
the plan a change lands on.

## Your access is the lower of two things [#your-access-is-the-lower-of-two-things]

Someone's access to a plan is the **lower** of their workspace role and their role on that plan.

The consequence that surprises people: giving a Comment-only teammate editor access on a plan does
not make them an editor. They can still only read and comment, because their workspace role is the
ceiling. Plansmith refuses that grant rather than accepting it and quietly doing nothing.

For what each workspace role can do, see [Members and roles](/docs/members-and-roles).

## Prototype links are different, on purpose [#prototype-links-are-different-on-purpose]

A [prototype](/docs/prototypes) share link is a public URL. Whoever holds it can open the
prototype, signed in or not.

<Callout type="warn">
  Switching a plan back to Private does **not** revoke an existing prototype link. The link was
  published deliberately, so it is revoked deliberately: open the share dialog and revoke it there,
  where you can also see how many live links exist.
</Callout>

Creating, rotating or extending a prototype link requires ownership of the plan. Revoking one only
needs edit access, because revoking can only ever narrow who sees it.