There are five default roles to choose from: Admin, Team lead, Responder, Member, and Billing admin. Assign a role to each team member based on what they need to access.

Go to Settings → Teams → Members to view and change each team member's role. You can also assign a role directly when sending an invite.

Roles are set per team, so the same person can be a Responder in one team and a Member in another. Admin is the exception and applies to every team in your organization.

Admin, Team lead, and Responder each consume a responder license. Manage the number of responder licenses in Settings → Usage → Responders.

Downgrading a team member's role to Member or Billing admin frees up their responder license for reassignment, but doesn't automatically reduce your total license count.

Admin

Can access all features, including monitors, incidents, on-call schedules, billing, organization settings, and API tokens.

Great for founders, engineering leads, and anyone who needs full control of your Better Stack account.

Team lead

Can access monitors, on-call schedules, escalation policies, status pages, incidents, reporting, sources, dashboards, error tracking, session replays, and AI SRE. Can invite team members and change their roles. Cannot edit billing or organization settings.

Great for engineering managers who oversee both day-to-day operations and on-call rotations.

Responder

Can access monitors, on-call schedules, escalation policies, status pages, incidents, reporting, sources, dashboards, error tracking, session replays, and AI SRE. Can invite team members. Cannot change team member roles or access global API tokens.

Great for engineers who respond to incidents and participate in on-call rotations.

Member

Can access log sources, live tail, dashboards, error tracking, session replays, and AI SRE. Cannot access monitors, incidents, on-call schedules, status pages, or reporting.

Great for developers who need to browse logs without access to Uptime features.

By default, members can self-upgrade their seat to Responder when they are added to an on-call schedule in Uptime. To disable this, go to Settings → Roles & Permissions → Member and uncheck Can upgrade their seat to Responder.

Billing admin

Can access subscription management, invoices, and payment settings. Cannot access monitors, incidents, sources, or any operational features.

Being Billing admin in any one team lets them manage billing for the whole organization.

Great for finance teams who need to manage billing without access to operational data.

Roles overview

Custom roles

Custom roles give administrators granular role-based access control (RBAC) over what each team member can access, down to the individual resource level. Custom roles are available on the Enterprise plan and let you map permissions exactly to your organization's structure.

To create a custom role, go to Settings → Roles & Permissions → Create role.