What are user roles and permissions in an app?

Anyone who opens the app and needs to see something different from the person next to them. The test is the screen: if two people would see the same thing and be allowed the same actions, they’re one role with two job titles.

• 01

  Customers. They see their own records and nobody else’s, and they can start things but rarely finish them.

• 02

  Field technicians. They see today’s work and the customers on it, on a phone, often with no signal.

• 03

  The office. It sees everyone’s records, assigns work, and fixes what came back wrong.

• 04

  Owners and managers. They see the totals, and sometimes nothing else.

• 05

  Outsiders. A subcontractor, a vendor, an auditor. A small part of it, usually to look and not to change.

A manager who sees everyone’s screens plus one extra report is a permission inside an existing role. They become a role of their own the day they need screens nobody else has.

Because a role is a version of the app. It has to be designed, built, and checked as if that person were the only one, and the rules keeping them out of everyone else’s records have to be right every time.

What you write

“Three kinds of user: customers, our technicians, and the office.”

What gets built

One sign-in that sends each kind of person to a different home screen. Three sets of screens, because a customer’s job page and a technician’s job page show different things and allow different actions. A rule on every record saying who can see it and who can change it. Then every path through the app walked three times, once as each person.

The estimator prices the second role as a feature and each one after it again, and stops counting at six. A seventh adds nothing, because by then the rules about who sees what are written once, and a new kind of user is one more entry in them.

$3,000 – $5,000 for the second kind of user. The reference app prices at $35,000 – $49,000 with the office not counted as a second kind of user, and $38,000 – $54,000 when customers and the people in the office see different things.

$42,000 – $60,000

Three kinds of user, $4,000 – $6,000 more than two

$51,000 – $73,000

Five kinds of user, on the same app

Run the reference description, which says “two kinds of user, customers and us.” In the result, open “Did we get something wrong?” and change “Distinct types of user” to watch the number move. To see the one-role figure, pick 1 and then switch off “Multiple user types with different permissions”; the estimator keeps that on until you do.

The estimator’s first-release option never carries more than two. Give it three and it proposes launching with the two that matter most, alongside a smaller office side and no notifications yet: $29,000 – $41,000 instead of $42,000 – $60,000. That’s the same first release the two-role app gets, because the third role is the thing it leaves out.

A role is who someone is. A portal is a place they go. Most apps with staff have both: the role pays for the rules and the staff screens, and the admin portal pays for the web application those screens live in.

Roles without a portal

Staff screens inside the same phone app, under a staff role. Fine while the office side is small and the people running it are on their feet.

A portal without roles

The estimator allows it, and the one-role figure on this page is built that way, so the second role can be priced on its own. In practice the office side means people in the office, and they’re a second kind of user. Ask for a portal and the estimator switches accounts on; the count of user types is still yours to give.

A second kind of user is cheap next to the web application they work in. The $25,000 guide prices the two side by side on a smaller app, and the portal is the one that breaks the budget.