We’ve been working to streamline the experience for individuals working in Observable rather than shoehorning everyone into “teams of one”. I wrote about it here, and would welcome your feedback either in this thread or by commenting on the notebook:
https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/a-better-individual-experience
Thank you!
Hello,
First post… 
If I understand correctly, to create a new “workspace” at some point in the future (which isn’t yet known), you’ll need a “team plan”, even if you’re working alone (a sort of “meteam”). Now that the “Pro plan” is available, all notebooks located in “workspaces” that don’t have a “team plan” will soon be considered part of the “free plan”. Am I right???
Until now, I’ve been using “workspaces” as “top-level folders” to organize my work as efficiently as possible. Among other things, I have to produce about ten visualizations each month for a publication*, and regularly create and update other content. even while working alone, “workspaces” can be a very useful feature.
Since the JavaScript embed code is also essential for me (priority number one) — because, like others I think, I have no choice but to use a CMS — we had budgeted for a “Pro plan”. So if I understand well, we’ll have to switch to the “Team plan” to keep the “workspaces”. The question is: when will billing be available (currently listed as “coming soon”)???
Like you and many others, I’m going through a stressful time with this transition. I’m new to JavaScript programming (less than two years) with a background in statistical software some of which is somewhat outdated now, and I’m the only one handling all this work at my small research institute, while having to meet very strict deadlines.
I’m sorry, but I really need more clarity regarding updates.
Finally, I’d like to take this opportunity in my first message to thank you for your exceptional work. Observable is definitively a masterclass in so many aspects.
Marc m(_ _)m
*Population and Societies – French National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED)
Hi Marc, thanks for writing in!
Let me first say that we appreciate your patience. We know that any change we make (whilst intending to improve Observable for current and future users) is disruptive for such a widely-used product; I think of xkcd 1172 daily. We are trying to minimize overall disruption. Even so, some users, based on their usage patterns or configuration, invariably feel a disproportionate amount of that pain. Your feedback is extremely helpful and we are eager to work with you to better understand what you need and to further improve Observable.
To summarize our product plan for Observable going forward:
It sounds like you are currently using multiple teams to organize your notebooks. It’s never been our intent for teams to be used to organize resources; they are instead intended to define units of collaboration: stable groups of people working together privately with higher shared trust.
(In the near future we plan to support more ad hoc collaboration for both Pro and Teams whereby you can invite external collaborators to work on specific notebooks. This will allow more ephemeral, transient, one-off collaboration rather than persistent, stable group collaboration. And of course you can fork and merge notebooks for decentralized collaboration if cases of lower trust, as when working in the public.)
Our hope is that both personal workspaces and teams provide sufficient organizational capabilities for notebooks so that you don’t need to resort to multiple teams. Specifically we intend collections and search to be used to organize and discover notebooks. Can you help us understand your organizational needs, and the ways in which these features are or aren’t meeting them? That said, we haven’t shipped collection editing for New Observable yet, nor search; those will be coming in the next few weeks, so you’ll need to use Old Observable in the interim to create or edit collections (which are then visible in New Observable) and to search.
Note that New Observable now lists only “root” (non-nested) collections on your collections page. This makes it much easier to effectively organize notebooks because you can create as many sub-collections as you like while still having a tidy top-level organization.
New Observable will also soon have the ability to transfer notebooks between teams and workspaces. We’re hoping to implement bulk transfer so that users can more freely more their notebooks around and consolidate workspaces. Let us know if we can help with that process in the interim.
To sum up, our hope is that we can meet your needs either with a Pro personal workspace (if you’re working solo) or a single Team (if you have people that you want to collaborate with privately). Either of these will allow you to use JavaScript embeds. And if you need additional capabilities within either your personal workspace or team, please let us know so we can build it and improve the product! Thank you.
I hadn’t realized how much the display of collections and subcollections had been improved in 2.0. To be honest, it’s pretty awful in 1.0, and that’s why I was using workspaces as a “root” collection for main projects. The Pro option will be perfectly suited to my needs for now.
I’m delighted to hear that! We will ship collection editing for New Observable soon and I will report back here when it is live.