Clients ask for updates, and you stop work to write them
A client emails on a Tuesday afternoon. They want to know where the redesign has got to, whether the new contact form is live, and if the site was down over the weekend. You know the answers. Writing them up takes twenty minutes, and then you lose the thread you were following before you started.
This happens to solo developers, freelancers who run client sites, and small agencies all the time. The fix is not a longer weekly call. It is giving the client a place to look for themselves, and keeping that place accurate without extra effort.
What a free viewer is
A viewer is someone who can see a project without taking a paid seat. They can open the project and see its state, but they do not add to the cost of your plan. That matters when the person asking questions is the client, who has no reason to pay for a tool they use once a week.
The plan price is set on the pricing page, so the cost question is simple to answer. The details of what a viewer can open, and what they cannot, are in the docs. Read those before you send an invite, because the exact permissions decide what your client will see.
What you share and what stays private
Before you invite anyone, decide what the client needs to know. In most client work that is a short list: which tasks are in progress, which are finished, and what is waiting on them. It is usually not your internal notes, your time estimates, or work on other clients.
Keep those boundaries in mind when you set up the project. Put client-facing tasks in one place and keep anything internal somewhere the viewer does not need to read. If you are not sure whether a piece of information belongs in the shared view, leave it out and tell the client directly when it matters.
Alert emails go only to people in your organisation, so a client viewer does not receive your monitoring alerts. Those stay with you and your team.
A simple weekly habit
A shared view only helps if it is up to date. The habit that works is small and regular rather than large and occasional.
Keep tasks small. A task that says "homepage hero copy, first draft" tells a client more than one that says "frontend work". Small tasks also finish sooner, which gives the client a steady sense of movement.
Keep the list current. Move a task to done on the day it is done, not when you remember. Add a task when a client asks for something new, so the request is visible and not sitting in an inbox. Five minutes at the end of each week to tidy the list is usually enough.
Then let the client look. Some clients will check every day and some will never open it. Either way, the question "where is it up to?" now has an answer they can find without writing to you.
Pairing it with a status page
Clients often ask a second question alongside progress: is the site up? A status page answers that without a message from you.
AperioFlow lets you run a public status page that shows the current state of the services you monitor. When something breaks, you post an incident update there and your client can see that you know about it and are working on it. You do not have to write a separate email to explain the outage.
The two work well together. The project view shows the work. The status page shows whether the site is running. A client who can check both is less likely to write to you on a bad afternoon.
Every HTTPS monitor also checks the site's certificate and warns you before it expires, with alerts at 30, 14 and 7 days left. That is part of the monitor you already have, so you do not need a separate setup to catch an expiry date that is getting close.
What the team plan costs
If you work with other people as well as clients, the team plan is 29 pounds a month flat for up to 10 people, as on the pricing page. The price does not rise with each person added, up to that limit. The free plan includes 10 monitors, so you can try the monitoring side before you decide whether you need more.
Check the pricing page for the current details, as the figures there are the ones that apply.
Check the docs before you invite anyone
An invite is a commitment. Before you send one, read the docs for exactly what a viewer can see and what they cannot. Do a test run yourself, or ask a colleague to look at the project as a viewer would, and check that nothing internal is visible.
AperioFlow is run from the UK and your data is hosted in France. You can download your data at any time if you decide to move it, so the choice of tool does not lock your client work in.
If you want a simple way to answer the "what are you working on" question, start free and invite a client as a viewer. Start free at https://app.aperioflow.co.uk/#/signup