Onboarding clients in post-billing world

I have a new client that needs to get set up and I need to give them clear direction on the process and what to expect. As I understand the new structure, we have two options:

Does this sound like a decent summary of the two options?

Option One:
Clients have their own workspace account. A site plan is then added to that account.

PROS
Getting clients to sign up for their own accounts means that they just pay their own bills directly, which is ideal. We don’t want to have to bill clients individually for hosting.

CONS

  • We would need to have the client’s Workspace password details and log in using their account
  • This workspace account would then have full access to all plan settings
  • There is no way to control permissions and prevent the client from having full access to the designer.

Option two
Client projects stay within our Workspace account.

PROS

  • Clients will not have access to the Designer. They are given only “Editor” access to their site.
  • We will not require their password credentials.

CONS
We have to pay for hosting and then bill the clients for it, which is a completely unnecessary overhead for us to keep track of.

1 Like

Basically correct.

At present, your only other option is to download and host the site elsewhere. This allows you to setup a cheap webhost for your client which bills them directly. Their domain registrar likely provides web hosting already.

Downsides-

  • Yes you’ll need the login to do updates and publish
  • No CMS. You’ll have to integrated something external like Airtable.
  • No Editor. They have to call you to make changes ( excepting whatever CMS capabilities you’re able to provide.

Thanks for that. I can understand that is an option, but our clients need to update their content in a timely fashion. I will consider that for some use cases though.

I wonder what option two might mean for us in terms of privacy. Is there any risk of becoming a ‘joint controller’ as defined in GDPR? That would constitute a massive con.

That’s a valid question. We’ve decided that we don’t want to have client credit card information as that’s a major vulnerability. We also don’t want to be chasing after clients for minor bill expenses, and certainly don’t want to have to shut them off if they don’t pay their hosting bills.

With that in mind, we will be going with option one. Unfortunately this means we will have to have client password credentials, which is hardly ideal.

Hopefully Webflow will introduce a way for clients to add external team members to the team as designers / site admin like most other services of this sort.