The problem: clients ask for updates, and you end up writing status emails by hand
Every freelancer who runs a client site knows the questions. Is it live yet? Did the migration go through? Why was the site slow on Tuesday? Each one takes a few minutes to answer. You reply from memory, then open the monitor to check you got it right.
Small teams end up writing status emails by hand because only the people doing the work can see the project. The client asks, you look, you reply. That works for one client. It stops working when you have four.
A read-only viewer gives the client a place to look for themselves. They can see where things stand without waiting for your reply. You still decide what to say when something breaks, but you stop repeating the same update in five inboxes.
What a read-only viewer can see today and what they cannot change
A viewer can open a shared project and read it. They cannot change anything in it. They cannot edit tasks, change a monitor, or alter the project's settings. The role is read-only, so a client can look without moving work around.
Before you send an invite, check the project as it stands and decide what it shows. A viewer sees what is in the project, so the project needs to be ready for an outside reader.
A viewer is not the same as a public status page. A status page is for anyone who needs to know whether your service is up. A viewer is for a named person who wants to follow one piece of work. If your customers need to know about an outage, use a status update. If a client wants to track their project, invite them as a viewer.
Who to invite: a client, a freelancer's contact, a stakeholder outside the team
There are three common cases.
The first is the client: the person who pays for the work and asks for updates. They want to know what is done and what is next, and they do not need to change anything.
The second is a freelancer's contact: a designer, a second developer or an accountant who needs to see the state of a site without working on it.
The third is a stakeholder outside the team: a board member or a product owner at the client company who wants to follow progress without joining the day-to-day work.
Invite only people who need to read. Anyone who needs to change tasks or monitors should be a member of your team, not a viewer.
Alert emails go only to people in your organisation. A client outside your organisation will not receive them. If a client needs to hear about an outage, send them an incident update in the project or by email yourself.
How viewers relate to the Team plan: 29 pounds a month flat for up to 10 people, as on the pricing page
The Team plan is 29 pounds a month flat for up to 10 people, as on the pricing page. A flat price means the cost does not rise with each person you add, up to that limit.
Before you invite a larger group of outside readers, read the pricing page for the current terms. It sets out the plan limits, and that is the source to check when you plan who will look at a project.
If you are just starting, the Free plan includes 10 monitors. You can set up one client project, watch its sites, and decide later whether a team plan suits how you work.
A short example: a freelancer sharing one client project
Rhian runs a web studio of one. She looks after an online shop for a client. The client's operations lead wants to follow the site's progress without asking Rhian every morning.
Rhian shares the shop's project with the operations lead as a viewer. The lead opens it and sees the monitors for the shop and the tasks for the current redesign. He cannot move any of the tasks, and he does not need to.
One morning the checkout page slows down. Rhian posts an incident update in the project: what she has seen, what she is checking and when she will post the next update. The operations lead reads it in the project. He does not send an email asking what is happening, and Rhian does not write a separate status message.
What to keep out of a shared project: internal notes and unrelated tasks
A viewer sees the project, so treat the project as something you could show the client on a call.
Keep internal notes out. Private pricing, arguments about an invoice and half-formed thoughts about the client's staff do not belong in a project a client can read.
Remove tasks that belong to other clients or to your own admin. A project for one client should show that client's work and nothing else.
If you want your own record of a project, you can download your data. Keep a copy of what matters to you, and keep the shared project limited to what the client needs to see.
How to set it up in a few steps
- Create a project for one client, or open the one you already use.
- Check which monitors and tasks belong in it. Remove anything internal or unrelated.
- Decide what the client needs to read, and write a short note at the top of the project saying when you will post updates.
- Invite the client as a viewer, not as a team member.
- Tell the client what they can see, and that they cannot change it.
AperioFlow is run from the UK and hosted in France. Start free at https://app.aperioflow.co.uk/#/signup and share one project with a client.