Joining a Team

Someone has invited you to their CredenShare team. This page is written for the person being invited.

The invitation

An owner or admin adds your email address, and CredenShare emails you. The message names the team, gives the team owner's email address — the owner, not necessarily the admin who added you — states when the invitation expires, and carries the acceptance link:

https://app.credenshare.io/team-invite-confirm/?teamId=<team>&token=<token>

The token is valid for 24 hours from the moment the invitation was sent. There is no in-app inbox of pending invitations — the emailed link is the only way to accept. If you were invited to more than one team, each team sends its own email with its own link, and you accept each one separately.

Accepting

1. Open the link from the email.
2. If you are signed out, what happens depends on whether the invited address already has a CredenShare account:
   • It has none: the page shows Create your account. See If you did not already have a CredenShare account.
   • It has one: you are taken to the sign-in page. Sign in with the address the invitation was sent to, and you come back to the invitation.
3. The page confirms on its own. You will see Confirming invitation..., then Welcome to the team! and the team's name.
4. Select Go to My Teams.

Two things go wrong often enough to be worth naming.

You must be signed in as the invited address. The link does not carry your email; the app supplies whichever account you are signed in as. Accepting while signed in as a different account fails with This invitation was sent to a different account. Sign in with the email address it was sent to, then open the link again. Sign out, sign in as the invited address, then open the link again.

Copy the whole link. If it is truncated, the page stops with Invalid invitation link. Missing required parameters. before contacting the server.

If the invitation has expired

Past 24 hours, the page says This invitation link is invalid or has expired. Ask the team owner to invite you again. Ask a team owner or admin to resend it — they have a resend action next to your pending entry in the team's Members list.

A resend sent while the original is still valid re-sends the same link, so both emails work. A resend after it has lapsed issues a new link with a fresh 24 hours, and the old one stops working.

If you did not already have a CredenShare account

The invitation does not create an account. Its email asks you to accept the invitation and create your account, and carries the same acceptance link. Opened while you are signed out, the link shows Create your account:

• your email address, the one the invitation was sent to, which you cannot change;
• a password, entered twice. It needs at least 8 characters, an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a number and a special character.

Select Create account and join. The account is created with your email address already verified, you join the team, and you are signed in. As with every new account, your first sign-in asks you to accept the terms.

• To use Google instead: the form has no Google button. Sign in with Google using the invited address, then open the invitation link again.
• If the address already has an account (you created one in the meantime), the form says This address already has a CredenShare account. Sign in, then open the invitation link again.
• If the password is refused, the form says That password does not meet the requirements. Please choose another.

The link lasts 24 hours, and a resend works as described above. If you never accept, the invitation is deleted 30 days after its link expired, or sooner if the team withdraws it.

Invitations sent before October 23, 2026

An invitation sent before October 23, 2026 to an address with no account created the account for you, with the email address already verified. The email carries a second link alongside the acceptance link: a CredenShare share titled Your login information, holding your email address and a generated password. Only the invitation that creates your account carries it (if you were invited to several teams at once, only one of those emails has it), and team owners and admins cannot see that share in the team's lists. If your invitation has no such link and you have never set a password (for example, because you were first invited to someone's account rather than to a team), set one with Forgot password? on the sign-in page (Forgotten password).

That link can be opened for up to 7 days after the invitation was sent, and it closes five minutes after you first open it, whichever comes first. The email states its expiry. It also closes early if the team cancels your invitation, removes you, or is deleted. Open it once, copy the password straight away, and sign in. The password is permanent: it keeps working after the link closes. Change it under Account → Security → Change Password. If the link closed before you saved the password, set a new one with Forgot password? on the sign-in page, using the invited address. A resent invitation carries only the acceptance link, not a new login link.

Accept the invitation as well — creating the account and joining the team are two separate steps, and only the acceptance link does the second one. The acceptance link lasts 24 hours from the invitation, not 7 days like the login link, so accept it promptly. After that, ask for a resend as described above.

What changes once you join

You now have two workspaces: Personal, and the team. The switcher sits at the top of the sidebar, under the logo, and shows the active one; the team's own page has a Use Context button that does the same thing. Personal is the default, and nothing about your personal workspace changes when you join.

Which workspace is active decides where a new share, secure request or paste is filed, and whose allowance it draws on.

Your entitlements in the team come from the organisation, not from a plan of your own. A seat member has no subscription — you occupy one of the owner's seats — so the server resolves the team's plan through the team owner's subscription every time you act in the team workspace. On a Business team, a share you create in the team workspace is judged against Business limits even if your personal account is on Free.

The pooled allowance is genuinely pooled: everyone's team shares come out of one figure, and expired and deleted shares stay in the tally. See Plans and share allowance for how the window is worked out.

Automatic logout

A team owner can set a maximum inactivity timeout for everyone in the team. Your effective timeout is the shorter of that limit and your own setting under Account → Security → Automatic Logout; when it elapses you are signed out. Setting a longer personal value does not override the team's limit.

What your team can and cannot see

• Team owners and admins see every share and secure request created in the team workspace, with an Owner column showing who created each one. Other members see only their own items, and that scoping is enforced on the server rather than hidden in the interface.
• Your Personal workspace is never included. Team lists only ever cover items attributed to that team.
• A share's access history stays with its creator. Views, timestamps and IP addresses are readable only by the account that created the share — a team admin browsing the team's list cannot open your access trail.
• Your secure requests stay yours to open. Owners and admins see a team request's row, but its details page, edit form, submissions and export open only for you, its creator, with or without zero-knowledge custody, and only you can delete it.
• Seeing an item is not reading it. Shares are encrypted in your browser and the key travels in the link, so what an admin sees is metadata: title, short code, views, created and expiry dates. The exception is a team using zero-knowledge custody, below.

Leaving

There is no self-serve way to leave a team. Ask a team owner or admin to remove you; only they can. Removing you does not delete the shares you created in the team workspace, and it does not touch your personal account or your Personal workspace. It does revoke any API key you hold for that team; API keys that are not bound to the team are not revoked.

If the team uses zero-knowledge custody

Zero-knowledge custody is included with Business and Enterprise plans, and it is what lets team owners and admins open team shares created in the browser while the team key is on. It does not open a teammate's secure request or its submissions, which stay with the request's creator. Holding a seat on such a team is enough — you do not need a Business plan of your own — but only once you have accepted: a pending invitation confers nothing.

Joining is a two-step ceremony, and the second step is not yours.

1. Enrol. Go to Account → Security → Zero-knowledge custody and select Set up now. A passphrase is generated for you and shown once. Save it — nobody can recover it for you.
2. Wait for a grant. A team admin who holds the team key wraps it to your new account key. Until they do, the team's page tells you: A team admin has not granted you access to this team's encrypted content yet. You can see that items exist but cannot open them until they do.

The order matters. Nothing can be wrapped to you before you have enrolled, so an admin cannot grant you access first and have you enrol afterwards.

Full detail is in Zero-knowledge for teams.

Still stuck

Email support@credenshare.io with the team name and the address the invitation was sent to.