Only active users are counted against the license limit and you can deactivate/activate user accounts as needed. So if you have a lot of changing users (e.g. for short-term projects), you only need as many licenses as there are users active at the same time.

Regards,
Dennis

Will there be an ability to lock down inactive users? I mean, the limit is set to total number of accounts in the system or to total number of active users?

Yes, TestRail will be licensed per named users, i.e. a license is needed for every person who uses/accesses TestRail. We currently plan to price a single license around 159 EUR / 239 USD with discounts for multi-user packs (and additional discounts for beta testers). This includes one year of support and TestRail updates (minor and major).

Regards,
Tobias

Sure, I clearly understood you, thanks. As long as we are speaking about months, not years, it sounds acceptable.

Are there any plans about licensing policy for upcoming release?

This is difficult to tell at this point, we are currently busy finishing the 1.0 (which will be available next month) and plan to prioritize the feature set and make a roadmap for future versions after that. What I can say is that UTF-8 support most likely won't be available within the next 1-2 months. Sorry for not having better news, but I hope this clarifies our plans for TestRail a bit.

Regards,
Tobias

Tobias, thanks a lot for such detailed answer.

I hope it will not take too long to implement UTF-8, it's a pretty essential feature for our company.

Hello Alex,

Yes, we currently do not support UTF-8 and Unicode, but that's on our TODO list and will eventually find its way into the product.

Some background information, if you are interested:

There are a few technical reasons for not supporting UTF-8, the most important being the support for multiple databases. MySql has great support for UTF-8, but SQL server only supports UTF-16 for Unicode (maybe a few other encodings as well, but no UTF-8 unfortunately). There has been a discussion internally here to use a workaround, but we decided to delay Unicode support until the new Microsoft PHP for SQL server natively supports UTF-8 (which it does now, but it was too late to integrate it at this point for us).

So, while we want to support Unicode eventually and it has a high priority for us, it didn't make into the v1.0. However, it will most likely be available in a future version when TestRail receives a small technology refresh.

Regards,
Tobias