For agencies

The constraint

Client work multiplies everything. Every environment, every bill and every access list, once per client.

What goes wrong

Setup is quoted, upkeep is not

A client environment is built in week one and maintained for three years. The build was in the statement of work and the three years were not, so the cost lands on the next project instead.

The engagement ends, the hosting does not

The final invoice goes out and the infrastructure keeps running, because nobody wrote down who owns it afterwards. The agency stays on call for work it stopped being paid for.

Margin split by estimate

Spend arrives as one bill and is divided between clients at month end by guesswork. An estimate cannot be rebilled with confidence, so the smallest accounts are the ones whose margin nobody actually knows.

What changes

• What stops

  Each client environment is assembled by hand from a runbook and a memory.

  What replaces it

  Projects come from one shape, so client twelve costs what client two cost.

• What stops

  Spend is one number, split across clients by estimate.

  What replaces it

  Cost is attributed per project, so a line on your invoice is a line you can rebill.

• What stops

  Access granted for a finished project is still live, months later.

  What replaces it

  Access is scoped per project, and closing the project closes it.

• What stops

  Credentials sit with whoever set the client up, in whatever they use.

  What replaces it

  Handover moves a project, not one person's password manager.

Questions we get asked

Should the client buy this, or should we resell it?

Both happen and they are different businesses. If the client holds the account, you keep the margin on your work and none of the risk of their late payment. If you hold it, you carry their bill and their outage. Decide before the first invoice, because changing it afterwards is a migration.

What happens at handover when a client goes in-house?

The project transfers, which is the reason to keep one project per client rather than one shared environment. If handover is a threat to your revenue rather than the end of an engagement, the thing to fix is the contract, and no platform will fix it for you.

We run six client sites on one machine. Is that wrong?

It is cheaper, and it holds until one client's traffic becomes another client's outage, or until one of them asks who else is on the box and expects an answer. If your clients are small and none of them asks, keep the machine and spend the money elsewhere.

What fits