Organizations, sites, and roles

How access works across your organization and its sites, and how to invite people.

Organization roles

Every person in an organization is either an owner or a member:

• Owners can create and delete sites, invite and remove organization members, manage billing, and do everything a member can.
• Members can be given access to individual sites but can’t create sites, manage other members, or touch billing.

An organization needs at least one owner at all times — you can’t remove or demote the last one, and you can’t leave an organization if you’re its only owner while other members remain (promote someone else first).

Managing a site is an owner thing

Only organization owners can manage a site’s settings, members, roles, and variables, or reach its Danger Zone — there’s no separate “site admin” role. Site membership itself is entirely about content access: being added to a site determines what you can do in the CMS there, not whether you can manage the site.

Being an organization member doesn’t automatically give you access to any site — an owner has to explicitly add you to each site you need. This is deliberate: someone can be a paid seat in your organization without having editing access to every site you run.

Site roles

Every site member is assigned a site role, which controls what they can do in the CMS on that specific site:

• Full access — the built-in default role. Can use the CMS across every collection, with no restrictions.
• Custom roles — named roles you create yourself (for example, “Blog Writer”), each scoped to specific collections as edit / view-only / no-access. A member with a custom role only sees and can act on the collections it grants.

Restrictions are enforced on Turbo’s servers, not just hidden in the CMS UI (see How it works).

Creating, editing, or deleting custom roles is available as the advanced/custom roles add-on — see the Turbo plans for pricing. Without it, every site member is on the built-in Full access role. Deleting a custom role resets anyone assigned to it back to Full access.

Inviting people

From your organization’s Members page (owners only), invite by email and optionally grant access to specific sites — with a chosen role for each — at the same time, so you don’t need a separate step afterward. The invite is a link that’s valid for a limited time; if it expires or you need to send it again, you can resend or revoke it from the same page.

The person you invite doesn’t need an existing Decap Turbo account — accepting the invite walks them through creating one if needed. Accepting always adds them to your organization as a member, even if the invite’s only purpose was to give them access to specific sites; if that’s the case, they’ll land on their profile page with a direct link to open the CMS on their site(s), without needing to touch anything org-level.

You can also add someone who already has a Decap Turbo account directly, without sending an invite email, from the same Members page or from a specific site’s Members tab.

Site variables

Each site has its own key/value store, available under that site’s Variables tab (organization owners only) — a place to keep config and credentials scoped to that site.

Marking a variable as secret encrypts its value at rest before it’s stored, and masks it in the Turbo UI. Non-secret variables are stored as plain text and shown as-is. Use the secret flag for anything sensitive, like API keys or tokens.

Site locking

A site can become locked, meaning it’s read-only for everyone, including its own members, until an organization owner unlocks it. This happens either:

• Automatically, if your organization is downgraded or a subscription is canceled and you have more sites than your new plan allows (one site is retained and stays active; the rest lock).
• Manually, if an owner locks a site on purpose — for example, to free up a site slot on your plan without deleting it.

A locked site doesn’t count against your plan’s site limit, so unlocking one requires having a free slot (either by locking/deleting another site first, or upgrading).

Transferring a site

An owner can move a site to a different organization they belong to, from that site’s Danger Zone. Members, variables, and access scoping move with it — anyone who wasn’t already a member of the destination organization loses their site access as part of the move, since site access requires an org seat in that same organization.

Leaving or deleting an organization

Both live in your organization’s settings, under Danger Zone:

• Leave removes only your own membership. Blocked if you’re the only member (delete the org instead) or the last owner while others remain (promote someone first).
• Delete permanently removes the organization along with every site it owns, and all of those sites’ content cache, variables, and memberships. This can’t be undone — the confirmation shows how many sites are affected before you commit.

Belonging to zero organizations is a perfectly normal state — you’ll land on your profile with a prompt to create a new one whenever you’re ready.