Settings and configuration

pplCRM separates what affects you from what affects everyone. Settings (avatar menu → Settings) opens a compact popup for your personal preferences and applies every change instantly. There is nothing to save. The Workspace settings (administrators only, under Admin in the sidebar) set policy for everyone and use a deliberate Save with a leave-guard.

What lives in your Settings popup

• Notifications: a per-event matrix of email and in-app switches (mentions, task assigned, tasks due, person assigned, email assigned, export ready, import summary). Each toggle saves as you flip it. Import summaries arrive by email only. There is also one text-message alert — when a volunteer you invited is waiting for approval. It is on by default: an unapproved volunteer is stuck at a door until someone lets them in, so this is the one worth interrupting you for. Turn it off here if you would rather not be texted; you still get the email and the bell either way, and we never text you without a mobile number on your profile — add one under Mobile number on your profile, and Settings will remind you if the text alert is on with no number on file.
• Theme: Light, Dark, or System (follows your device’s setting), applied live. This is yours alone: an administrator changing the workspace default theme never overrides a theme you picked.
• Passkeys: the devices that can sign you in; add one with your device prompt, or remove one you no longer trust.
• Where you’re signed in: every browser and phone currently signed in to your account, showing the browser, the IP address it signed in from, when it signed in, and when it was last active. Sign out any one of them, or use Sign out N other devices to end them all at once. The browser you are reading this in is marked This device and has no button of its own; Sign out in the avatar menu is how you end that one. This is what to reach for if you lose a phone, or if a sign-out failed because you were offline at the time. Closing a browser does not end a session on its own: sessions last 24 hours, or 30 days if you chose “remember me”, and signing a device out here takes effect immediately.

What lives in the Workspace settings

The sidebar clusters the sections into four groups: Workspace, Email, Features, and Plan & account.

• Organization: your name, contact details, and mailing address, plus the settings everyone sees the effect of — time zone, currency, date format, and the default theme for people who have not picked their own. Time zone is the one worth setting first: it decides what “9am” means for service levels and working hours, and which day a date belongs to across the app. Currency is used for donations, pledges, and event pricing — both what a donor is charged and what you see.
• Modules: what kind of organization this is — Constituency office, Political campaign, Non-profit, or Church — and which optional modules (Canvassing, Deliveries, Donations, Approvals) are available. Most appear in the sidebar; Deliveries shows up as the Requests tab on the Canvassing page. The organization type only picks the wording and the starting set: a constituency office starts without Donations, because a publicly funded office does not fundraise — the campaign or riding association behind it does, on separate books. A module that is off — whether the organization type left it off or you switched it off yourself — stays in the sidebar, dimmed, so you can see it exists; clicking it points you back here. Turn any module on here and it lights up immediately. Turning one off never deletes anything, and never blocks a link you already have. Whichever type you pick is shown at the top of your avatar menu, so you can always tell which one a workspace is on; administrators can click it to come straight back here.
• Campaigns: your permanent office context and any election campaigns — create and archive them, set which office each one is running for, switch which one you (as an admin) are working in, and read how user assignment works. This section appears for organizations that run elections (a constituency office or a campaign). See Campaigns and contexts and What office a campaign is running for.
• Boundaries: the electoral maps your households are matched against — wards, ridings, districts, precincts. Import the names from a CSV, upload a published GeoJSON file, or draw the areas yourself over your own household pins. Adding or changing a map never calls a paid service. See Boundary maps.
• Teams & access: default role for invitations and the MFA requirement.
• Data & duplicates: maintenance for the address matching behind duplicate detection. Recomputing address fingerprints is worth doing if your addresses were imported oddly and duplicates are being missed; it is available once a month.
• Communications: default from-name and from-address (only an address on a domain you have verified, or your workspace’s own pplCRM address), reply-to, the newsletter footer disclaimer, and double opt-in for web-form subscribers.
• Email sync: connect your email provider so incoming and outgoing email syncs into your pplCRM inbox.
• Domain verification: the DNS records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) that let you send email from your own domain.
• Service levels: response-time targets for email and tasks, working days and hours, and the warning/critical thresholds behind the dashboard status.
• Donations: donation limit, residency restrictions, tax credit tiers, your Stripe connection, and tax receipt configuration — the receipting regime, registration number, signatory and signature image, and numbering prefix. None of it affects the donation receipt every gift gets automatically. See Donation receipts and giving statements.
• App: how the volunteer-facing apps behave, including whether volunteer links expire after 30 days. Expiry is the secure default (a forwarded or long-lost link goes dead on its own), but you can turn it off if your outings run longer. Volunteers still verify a code and need a one-time approval either way.
• Storage: your plan quota, live usage, and the files taking up the most space.
• Billing: your plan, live usage, and payment details.
• API keys: workspace API keys for server-side integrations (submitting forms, RSVPs, and volunteer signups from your own backend, or connecting Zapier). Grassroots and above. Each key is shown once, at creation. A workspace can hold two at once so you can rotate without downtime; revoking one takes effect immediately.
• Account: pause your organization account, or permanently delete it and all its data.

Plans and billing

pplCRM has three feature tiers: Free, Grassroots, and Movement. Which tier you are on decides which features you have. Within a paid tier, the price scales smoothly with your emailable-subscriber count instead of jumping between price points, so growing your list never means a sudden shock to the bill.

• Free: $0 forever. Up to 1,000 emailable subscribers, 2,000 emails a month, 2 staff seats, and 1 GB of storage. Includes the people CRM and newsletters. No shared inbox and no companion volunteers.
• Grassroots: starts at $29 a month for up to 1,000 emailable subscribers, then rises in steps as your list grows, up to $359 a month at its 100,000-subscriber ceiling. Adds the shared inbox (Gmail and Microsoft mailbox sync), web forms, donations, automations, lists, volunteer management (teams and events), and API access with 300+ integrations.
• Movement: starts at $55 a month for up to 1,000 emailable subscribers, then rises in steps up to $665 a month at its 200,000-subscriber ceiling. Adds the canvassing and deliveries companion apps with unlimited companion volunteers: turf cutting, walk lists and routes, field reports, yard signs, and route optimization, plus priority support.
• Enterprise: for federations, parties, and multi-office operations with custom needs. Pricing is negotiated directly. Reach out from the Billing page.

Every plan meters emailable subscribers, not total contacts. Your whole voter or canvassing universe stays free to store; you only pay for the people you can actually email.

Paid plans can be billed monthly or annually. Annual billing costs exactly 10× the monthly price at every bracket — 2 months free — paid up front for the year. Pick the interval with the Monthly/Annual toggle on the Billing page before upgrading. Already subscribed? Set the toggle to the other interval and your current plan’s card offers the switch; a dialog states what Stripe charges or credits before anything changes. Monthly is the default — if your campaign wraps up mid-year, don’t prepay twelve months.

Moving between the paid tiers (Grassroots ↔ Movement) happens right on the plan cards too: click the other tier’s button and confirm. The change applies immediately to your existing subscription — an upgrade charges the prorated difference for the rest of the current period and unlocks the new features right away; a downgrade turns the higher tier’s features off immediately and credits the unused amount toward future invoices. The confirmation dialog lists exactly which features turn off before you commit. Moving to Free is different — it is a cancellation; see [Canceling a paid plan](#cancel-downgrade).

Plan prices exclude tax. Where your jurisdiction requires it, sales tax, VAT, or GST is calculated and added at checkout based on the billing address you enter there, and appears as its own line on every invoice and receipt. If your organization has a business tax number (VAT, GST, or similar), you can enter it at checkout so it appears on your invoices and any business-to-business tax treatment applies automatically.

What happens when your list grows or shrinks

When your emailable-subscriber count crosses into a higher price bracket, every admin and owner is notified, the subscription moves to the new bracket, and the prorated difference for the remainder of your current billing period is charged right away — on either interval. Growth never interrupts sending, and your monthly email allowance rises with the new bracket the moment it applies. If your list shrinks back below a bracket, the lower price reconciles at the next renewal rather than refunding the current period. If a payment fails, newsletter sending goes on hold until the payment method is updated on the Billing page — everything else keeps working.

Canceling a paid plan (moving to Free)

To cancel, use Downgrade to Free on the Billing page — the button appears both next to your current plan and on the Free plan card, and both start the same thing. It first shows exactly what will change in your workspace, then schedules the cancellation for the end of the period you have already paid for — and you can Resume subscription any time before that date. When the downgrade lands, Grassroots and Movement features turn off: published forms stop accepting submissions, API keys stop working, automations stop processing, and the shared inbox locks. If your workspace has more than 1,000 emailable subscribers, newsletter sending is blocked until the list is reduced to the Free limit or you upgrade again. Your contacts and other data are never deleted, with one exception: email synced from a connected mailbox is permanently deleted 30 days after the downgrade, and re-subscribing later cannot restore it — the workspace owner gets an email spelling out all of this, with the exact deletion date, when the downgrade takes effect.