Client Portal for Marketing Agencies

Your client replies to a three-week-old email thread asking for a resend. The WeTransfer link expired. The Dropbox folder moved. The revision notes are buried in a reply chain. For marketing agencies that exchange files with clients every day, this is a familiar, avoidable problem -- and it costs real time.

Why Does File Delivery Break Down at Agencies?

Because the tools most agencies use were not built for ongoing client file relationships. Email attachments, expiring links, and shared folders all work for one-off transfers -- they break down once you have multiple clients, multiple projects, and a team of people all touching the same files.

Email attachments hit size limits fast with video exports, raw image files, and large design packages. Reply chains fragment feedback across threads. When a client asks for a file from last quarter, someone has to dig through months of messages. There is also no record of whether a client downloaded the file -- only whether you sent it.

Transfer services like WeTransfer solve one problem -- sending large files once -- but their free links expire in seven days. Clients end up downloading everything locally to beat the deadline, losing version history in the process. Shared drives work until permissions drift, folders get renamed, or a team member shares the wrong version with the wrong client.

There is also the brand problem. Every WeTransfer notification your client receives carries WeTransfer's logo -- not yours. For an agency that charges for brand and professionalism, handing off final deliverables through someone else's product is a small but real contradiction.

What a Branded Client Portal Gives You

A client portal built for agencies does four things: it keeps all files organized per client, it puts your brand on the experience instead of a third-party tool, it gives you a complete download audit trail, and it lets clients access and upload files without paying for anything.

• One organized space per client -- all files and project history in one place for that account, not scattered across threads
• Your brand on everything -- your logo, your colors, and your domain on the portal and on every notification email it sends
• A complete access log -- who downloaded which file, and when, with timestamps you can export
• No client fees or installs -- clients sign in from a browser; your agency pays for the portal, not your clients

ProjectSend Cloud is the hosted version of ProjectSend, the open-source client file-sharing project licensed under GPLv2 -- free forever, with an active community and 4,000+ self-hosted instances worldwide. The cloud version gives you the same software without the operational overhead of running your own server.

How ProjectSend Cloud Works for Agencies

On the Pro plan ($19/mo), your agency gets its own dedicated portal -- a ProjectSend instance running on its own database, with your logo and brand colors on the portal and on every notification email your clients receive. Clients sign in with a username and password; nothing to install, nothing to pay.

Here is what Pro covers for a typical small agency:

• Your own portal with your logo and brand colors (your own custom domain coming soon)
• 25 active client accounts included (then $0.40 each; archive a client when the project closes and they stop counting)
• 100 GB storage included (then $0.02/GB) -- enough for most agencies handling design and video deliveries
• 3 workspace users (your team seats) included, then $4/seat per month
• Resumable uploads for large files -- video exports, raw photo packages, and large design deliveries upload reliably
• Download audit trail -- every file access is logged with timestamp and user

Your clients never pay. Pricing is based on the active client accounts you maintain -- archive a client when a project closes and they stop counting toward your total immediately.

The Delivery Experience Is Part of Your Product

When a client downloads their final brand guidelines from a portal that has your agency's name and logo on it, they are having a branded experience end to end. When they receive a WeTransfer notification from a generic sender, that experience breaks at the last step.

Agencies that charge premium rates for strategy, design, and brand work should deliver those files from a premium-feeling channel. See the product overview to see how the portal looks to your clients from the moment they sign in.

There is also a trust dimension for agencies that handle sensitive materials -- unreleased campaign assets, brand guidelines before a public launch, proprietary strategy documents. A portal with per-client access controls and a full audit log of who saw what and when is a better channel for those files than an email thread or a shared folder with loose permissions.

What Does It Cost for a Small Agency?

For a small agency of 3 to 5 people with 10 to 25 active client engagements, the math is simple: Pro at $19/month covers the portal, 25 client accounts, and 3 team seats. Add extra seats at $4 each if your team is larger.

A 5-person agency (Pro + 2 extra seats) pays $27/month total. That covers all 25 client accounts. If you regularly wrap projects and archive inactive clients, you can stay comfortably within the included accounts even with a busy pipeline.

The pricing model is built around active client accounts -- the accounts currently active in your portal. This is different from per-seat tools, where every individual client user counts as a paid seat. In a per-seat model, an agency with 5 staff and 25 clients pays for 30 seats. With ProjectSend Cloud you pay for your team and the client accounts you keep active; archive a client when the project ends and they stop counting.

How Does This Compare to WeTransfer or a Shared Drive?

WeTransfer and similar transfer tools solve one-time delivery. They are not client portals: there are no persistent client accounts, no organized per-client history, no branded experience, and no download audit trail. They work for sending one large file once; they do not work as an ongoing client channel.

Shared drives (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive) are built for internal team collaboration, not client-facing portals. Permission management gets messy at scale. Clients can accidentally see folders that belong to other engagements if permissions are set loosely. And the brand experience belongs to the drive provider -- not to your agency.

A dedicated client portal handles these cases by design: one organized space per client, under your brand, with controlled access and a log of every file event. The open-source project behind ProjectSend Cloud has 1,900+ GitHub stars and 4.8 million Docker downloads -- it was built specifically for this use case and has been running in production at thousands of firms for years.

For background on how the hosted version came to exist, see the launch post: Hello there -- a new era for ProjectSend.

Ready to move your agency's client file delivery off email and onto a portal with your brand on it? See the plans -- start free, no credit card, no time limit.