Your clients are not a billing line.
Most software charges you per person, then counts your clients as people. So you keep them outside the system, and everything they need to see turns back into email. Portals are how UNOBITS avoids that: outsiders get a way in, and never a seat on your bill.
- Clients are free to add
- Included on every plan
- 14 days free
Four conversations you stop having.
None of these are hard problems. They are just constant, and they all come from the client being outside the place the work happens.
“Any update on this?”
The question that arrives every Thursday. The portal shows the current state of the work, drawn from the actual job rather than a status someone remembered to type.
Approval buried in a thread
Sign-off happens on the thing itself, with a record of who approved what and when. It stops being an email you have to go and find in six months.
The fourteenth version of a file
Files live on the job, not in an attachment chain. Your client sees the current one, because there is only one.
Messages lost in someone’s inbox
Clients message your team from the portal, next to the work it is about — instead of a line in an email someone may or may not have read.
It is a window, not a copy.
Client-facing dashboards usually rot because somebody has to maintain them. This one shows the same records your team is working in, so keeping it current is not a task anybody owns.
Bring the people you work with inside.
Clients, contractors, accountants, the person who only needs to approve one thing a month. None of them cost you a seat.
The questions clients raise first
Do my clients need a paid seat?
No. Portal access is not a licence, and clients and contractors do not count against the people on your plan. This is deliberate — software that charges you for including the people you work with quietly discourages you from including them.
Can clients see things I do not want them to?
They see only what the portal exposes: the status, files, invoices and approvals you have shared with them, plus a way to message your team. Your team can check exactly what a client sees with the Live Inspector. Internal discussion, margins, other clients and everything else stay where they are. The portal is a view onto your records, not a door into them.
Is it a separate product I have to set up?
It is part of the same system, reading the same jobs and files your team already works in. There is no second copy to keep in step, which is the usual reason client-facing views go stale.
Can it look like my business rather than yours?
Yes — custom branding comes with Pro, and fully white-label portals with Enterprise. For a client, arriving somewhere that looks like your company rather than your vendor is most of the point.