Setting up Mass Dynamics for a core facility or shared service
If you run a core facility, a shared instrument centre, or any group that analyses data on behalf of others, your setup questions are different from a single lab's. You are not just choosing a plan. You are deciding who holds the licence, who administers it, and how work for one client stays separate from work for another.
This page covers how facilities usually answer those questions.
Who holds the Mass Dynamics subscription?If the facility purchased the subscription, the facility holds the license, not the client or collaborator.
A Lab licence covers your team and its collaborators. It is not priced per individual user, which matters for a facility, because the people who need access change constantly - a client's postdoc may need to see one project for three months and then never again. Paying per seat for that pattern does not work, so we do not price that way.
Practically, this means the facility buys one licence and brings clients or collaborators into it, rather than each client bringing their own.
Choosing a tier
Please refer to the Pricing Page.
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Most facilities start on Lab. The question that moves a facility to Organization is rarely dataset volume. It is governance: whether access has to be set by an administrator rather than by the scientist doing the work, and whether you need an audit trail of who saw what.
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Academic facilities get double the Lab dataset allowance at no extra cost — 400 instead of 200, at the same Lab price.
Your team controls access to individual projects, so each client sees only the work shared with them. A client does not see your other clients, and does not see your internal work.
If your separation obligations are contractual — a CRO, or a facility handling commercially sensitive client work under agreement — look at Organization. Central administration means access does not depend on an individual remembering to share correctly, and the audit log means you can demonstrate it.
Working with clients who do not codeThis is the defining feature of facility work: your bioinformaticians read the data, and your clients need to act on it without learning to.
Shared workspaces and team project history mean a client can follow the analysis rather than receive a file at the end. The analysis is traceable back to the data, so when a client asks why a result looks the way it does, the answer is in the platform rather than in someone's memory.
Jason Rogalski, who manages the Proteomics Core Facility at the University of British Columbia, describes this as the core of the job — making mass spectrometry results usable by the researchers who commission them. Read his story →
Connecting your own toolsEvery plan, including Free, includes API and MCP access. For a facility this is usually the most interesting line on the pricing page and the least noticed.
MCP access means your team can connect an AI tool — Claude, ChatGPT and others — directly to your data, and ask questions of it in plain language rather than through a UI. For a facility fielding the same client questions repeatedly, that is the difference between answering them and automating them. How to connect your AI tool →
Dataset limits and what happens at the ceilingLab includes 200 live datasets, 400 for academic facilities. "Live" is the operative word: past your allowance, older datasets archive rather than delete.
Trying it firstThe free plan takes a card-free sign-up and includes every analysis and workflow, unlimited runs, and full API and MCP access. Three datasets live at a time.
For a facility the useful test is not a demo dataset. It is two projects set up the way you actually run — one bioinformatician, one client who does not code — to see whether the sharing model fits how you work. That question is answered in an afternoon and not by a spec sheet.