Clients in the room without charging for them

Every studio has the same email thread. The client asks where the homepage copy is up to. Somebody looks it up, writes a paragraph, and sends it. Two days later the client asks again, because something changed. The paragraph gets rewritten. The actual work is sitting in a tool the client cannot see, and the studio's job has quietly become translating it into email.

The obvious fix is to let the client in. The reason nobody does is that in most tools a client is a seat, a seat costs money, and a client with a seat can see the other clients.

Guests are free, and always will be

In sjTasks a guest is not a person for the purpose of the plan. Admins and members — the people who do the work — are counted. Guests are not, on any plan, in any number, and they are free on the Free plan too. You can put every client you have into their own project and pay for the people on your team, which is the only number that should ever have been on the bill.

What a guest can see

A guest is always scoped to named projects. Invite Acme's marketing lead as a guest, tick the Acme project and nothing else, and that is the whole of their world. They sign in and see one project. Your other clients are not hidden from them behind a permission; they are simply not there. The search box will not find them. A view somebody has shared with the team will not list them. There is one rule for who sees a project — admin, team-wide member, or added to that project by name — and everything else follows from it. Shared views obey it too: sharing shares the question, not the answers, so a view shared with the studio can never widen what a guest sees.

Inside their project a guest can read everything: every task, every note, every file. They can open and download files. They can follow a task so the bell tells them when it moves — the same following that feeds the Monday email, if they want one. And they can write notes — and edit or delete their own — which is the part that ends the email thread.

What a guest cannot do

A guest cannot create or edit a task, finish or reopen one, change a priority or a due date, upload or remove a file, log time, be assigned work, or change anything about the project itself. The buttons for those things are not shown to them, rather than shown and refused, so nobody is invited to click something that will say no.

That line is drawn on purpose. A client who can move your due dates is a client who will, with the best intentions, on a Friday afternoon. What a client needs is to see where things are and to say things about them. Reading and notes is exactly that, and nothing more.

What it looks like from Acme's side

Acme's marketing lead opens the Acme project on Tuesday. The progress line says 7 of 12 done. Write the homepage copy is in progress, Sandy's, due Friday. They open it and read Sandy's last note — "Draft attached, two questions about the pricing section" — and the draft is right there. They answer the two questions in a note of their own. Sandy is watching the task, so she hears about it on the bell and by email, with the note quoted in full.

Nobody wrote a status paragraph. Nobody forwarded a file. When the client asks on Thursday where the copy is up to, the honest answer is "you were the last person to write on it".

Who is watching what

Guests do not appear in the assignee list, ever, so no one can accidentally put work on the client. They can follow and unfollow tasks for themselves, which is how they stay out of the threads they do not care about. A guest who has been added to no project yet sees nothing at all, which is the right default for an invitation that has been sent but not set up.

Inviting one takes three choices in Team Settings: their email, the role Guest, and the projects to tick. The link they receive is good for seven days, names your team and the projects, and lets them choose a name and a password. If they already use sjTasks with another studio, they sign in and the project appears in their list of teams instead.

The question this answers

The question a client actually asks is not "how is it going". It is "is anything late on my project", and it is a question you should be able to answer before they do.

Show me what is past due — and pick their project from the Project menu. If the list is empty, that is the whole status update.