Start free, grow into Atlas: planning your path through the tiers

Atlas is sold in three tiers — Basic (free), Advanced ($5 a month) and Enterprise ($99 a month) — and each includes everything in the one before it. That structure means you never have to guess at your future needs before you start. You pick the tier that fits today and move up when the business is ready.

This article describes a typical path and the signals that tell you it’s time for the next step.

Stage 1: Basic — consistent forms, for free

What you get: data schemas, record schemas and printable forms. On Basic, Atlas shows two areas in its navigation: Data Schemas and Forms.

Who it fits: businesses whose forms are still filled in by hand — at a front desk, on a clipboard, at a job site — and who want every copy to ask the same questions the same way.

What you build here: the reusable pieces. Contact Details, Service Address and any domain-specific schemas you need. These are the foundation for everything later.

Time to move on when: customers ask to fill the form in online, or you find yourself retyping paper forms into another system.

Start with Build your first form in Atlas.

Stage 2: Advanced — collect online

What you get: everything in Basic, plus a public link for every form and a new area in the navigation, Data Collection, which holds the forms you’ve published and everything people have sent back through them.

What carries over: all of it. The form you built on Basic is already there, with its schemas attached at the versions you published and the layout you gave it. Nothing about it has to change to collect it online.

Who it fits: businesses that want customers, applicants or partners to submit information themselves, with their name and email captured and a review step before they submit.

Time to move on when: you need to organize what you collect around the things your business tracks — customers, properties, equipment, jobs — or control who can see which parts of your data, or build your own applications on top of it.

Read Collect your form online with a public link.

Stage 3: Enterprise — organize the whole business

What you get: everything in Basic and Advanced, plus your own classifications, security policies, and Atlas as the backend for your own applications through the Atlas API Client and Atlas SDK. Enterprise includes 10,000,000 platform requests a month, then $1 per 100,000.

What carries over: your data schemas. On Enterprise, record schemas inside a classification are built from the same reusable data schemas you defined on Basic.

Who it fits: businesses that want Atlas to organize not just their forms but the whole operation, and teams that want to build customer portals, dashboards or mobile apps on a single set of data.

Read Create your first data classification.

Planning tips

Invest in data schemas early. They’re free, they carry through every tier, and they’re the part of your model that pays off the most. Designing good data schemas covers how to draw the lines.

Don’t upgrade for features you won’t use yet. A business that only prints forms gets full value from Basic.

Upgrade when a process changes, not when a calendar says so. The right moment to go to Advanced is when the first customer asks for a link. The right moment for Enterprise is when you start keeping a spreadsheet next to Atlas to track the things your forms are about.

Sketch your classifications before you build them. Before moving to Enterprise, list the kinds of things your business tracks and how they nest. Modeling your business in Atlas walks through the exercise.

Three example paths

Different businesses move through the tiers in different ways. Three common patterns:

The paper-first business. A trades business with a front desk and crews in the field. It spends months on Basic, printing consistent forms built from reusable schemas. When customers start asking to submit online, it upgrades to Advanced and shares the same forms by link. Enterprise may never be necessary.

The online-intake business. A service provider that already takes requests through its website. It builds its schemas and forms on Basic in an afternoon, moves to Advanced within the week, and uses Data Collection as its intake inbox. It moves to Enterprise when it wants to organize requests around customers and locations.

The platform business. A company with a developer that wants its own customer portal. It models its data on Basic and Advanced while planning, then moves to Enterprise to create classifications, set security policies and build on the Atlas API Client and Atlas SDK.

What to build at each stage so nothing is wasted

• On Basic, invest in well-designed data schemas. They carry through every tier and become the building blocks of Enterprise record schemas.
• On Advanced, refine your forms based on real submissions. Adjust schemas and publish new versions; past submissions keep their original shape.
• On Enterprise, model the things you track as classifications, decide ownership with user groups, and write a small set of shared security policies.

Signals it’s time to upgrade

Frequently asked questions

Can I move down a tier later? Pricing and plan changes are handled through your subscription; see pricing for current options.

Do my forms change when I upgrade? No. The form you built on Basic is exactly as you left it on Advanced, with a public link added.

Do I need Enterprise to use record schemas? Record schemas are part of Basic, where forms compose data schemas into a record type. Enterprise adds classifications, where record schemas describe what you keep on file for each thing a classification holds.

Pricing at a glance

See current pricing for full details.