For agencies
One studio.
One link per client.
Most PM tools were built for product teams shipping one app forever. Agencies need something different: separate workspaces per client, branded portals on your own domain, public viewers that don't cost extra, and a way to spot studio-wide overload before Friday hits. Narcove's Team tier is built for exactly that.
What's hard right now
Three problems most studios know well
Tools billed per viewer. A ten-person studio with three retainer clients and four stakeholders per client ends up paying for twenty-two seats — twelve of which are watching, not working. Asana, Monday, ClickUp, and Jira all do this. The bill compounds every time you take on a new client.
Status updates per client. Friday afternoon. Five clients. Five status docs. Each one says roughly the same thing in five different formats. The team gives away half a day to status alone, and the docs are out of date by Monday morning.
Cross-client capacity is invisible. Most tools show you each project in isolation. A senior designer can be double-booked across three workspaces and nobody notices until the calendar collides. By then the answer is "work weekend" or "tell a client they're slipping."
What Team gives you
Six things built for the way studios actually work
One workspace per client
Acme's board never leaks into Globex's board. Switch with one click. Permissions are per-workspace, so a contractor working on Acme can't see anything else.
Free public viewers
Stakeholders, execs, external reviewers, and the client's clients don't need a paid seat. They watch the portal — branded with your studio mark — and submit requests via the public form. They never count as a billable user.
AI scheduling at scale
Plan-with-AI takes a brief and produces a costed schedule. Soundings narrows time guesses as your team finishes work. The Tide replans the chart whenever a slot opens or closes. Higher AI rate limits on Team — three times the Pro cap.
Per-client retainers
Each project carries a retainer hours pool. The Chart highlights when a client is approaching their cap so you can have the conversation early — not when they get the invoice. Hours used show on the public portal too.
Studio-wide capacity
See every editor's loaded hours across every workspace. Spot when one designer is double-booked across three clients before the week starts. Drag-balance load across the team without leaving the capacity view.
£99 flat-5 pricing
Five seats for £99 a month flat + VAT. Adds £15 per seat after that, also + VAT. Sized for typical studio pods. Cheaper than per-seat at exactly five — and the public portal is included on every tier.
Use cases
Five typical studio scenarios
Brand sprint
Four weeks. Three rounds of feedback. One client.
Your client is at portal.acme.co with their logo on it. Their PM submits feedback on wireframes via the portal form. The card lands in your Acme workspace tagged for triage. The Tide cascade pulls design forward when copy lands early. By Friday week two, the client has watched the schedule pull forward twice without a single status email from you.
Retainer client
Eight hours a month, transparent backlog
The client's portal shows a running backlog. They submit new requests via the public form. They watch what's in flight and see the hours pool tick up as work finishes. When you're close to the cap, the projection turns coral — you have the conversation early instead of in invoicing week.
Multi-client week
Three clients. One designer. One Friday afternoon.
Studio-wide capacity view shows your senior designer is loaded with eleven hours on Friday. Two of those are for Acme, two for Globex, seven for Initech. The Tide pulls forward an Initech card that lands early on Thursday. Your designer finishes Friday at 3pm without a single context-switch surprise.
New project pitch
Plan-with-AI for a fixed-price proposal
A prospect sends a brief. You drop it into Plan-with-AI in a fresh workspace. Claude reads the cards, infers dependencies, and produces a Chart. You review, adjust, and export the timeline as a PDF for the proposal. Time spent: 20 minutes. Time saved: an afternoon.
Scaling the studio
Going from 4 editors to 9
You hire two designers and a PM. Add three seats to the flat-5 deal — total bill £144 a month + VAT, one invoice. Each new editor inherits workspace permissions. The capacity view automatically shows them on the studio timeline. No reconfiguration, no separate billing per client.
A typical Friday
What a normal day looks like with three retainer clients
09:00 — Studio standup. The capacity view shows everyone's load for the day across all three clients. One designer is over-allocated by two hours. A quick re-shuffle moves a non-critical Globex card to next Tuesday.
11:00 — Wireframes for Acme finish an hour ahead of guess. The Tide pulls their design phase forward. The Acme client portal updates. Their PM sees the new ETA without you sending a single Slack.
13:00 — Initech submits a new request via their public portal. The card lands in Initech's Harbour with the submitter's email. Your account lead triages it as "next sprint" and the client gets an automatic email confirmation with a link to track the request.
16:00 — Globex's monthly retainer cap is at 87%. The Chart shows it in coral. Your account lead sends a heads-up: "we've got two cards left in this month's budget — what's priority?" That conversation happens in advance, not on invoice day.
17:30 — Friday wrap. No status emails written. Three client portals updated themselves all day. The team books off, on time.
Pricing for agencies
Team or flat-5
£99 flat-5
£99 / month + VAT
Five seats. Every Team feature included. Adds £15 per extra seat after that.
Team per seat
£29 / seat / month + VAT
For studios under five editors. Same Team features at per-seat pricing.
All prices ex VAT. Public portal viewers are always free. Annual billing saves 20%. Registered UK charities get 50% off. Full pricing details →
FAQ
Agency questions
How do separate workspaces work?
Each client gets their own workspace. Their cards, members, and files stay separate. You switch between workspaces with one click. Permissions are workspace-level, so a freelancer working on Acme can't see Globex's board even if they're a member of your studio.
Can I put each client portal on their own domain?
Yes, on Team. Point a CNAME from portal.acme.co to portal.narcove.com and we serve their portal at that URL with their logo, colours, and email-from address. You can do this for as many clients as you have.
Do clients need a paid seat to use the portal?
No. Public viewers are always free. A retainer client with five stakeholders, a PM, and an exec is six free viewers. You only pay for editors — the people in your studio doing the planning and shipping.
What about studio-wide capacity?
On Team, the capacity view shows every editor in your studio across every workspace. You see a single timeline of who's loaded with what, where the conflicts are, and where the slack is. Spot a designer double-booked across three clients before the week starts.
Can we track retainer hours per client?
Yes. Each project carries a retainer hours pool. Cards count against the pool as they finish. The Chart turns coral when you're close to the cap. You see it before invoicing — and so does your client, on the portal.
How does the £99 flat-5 work?
Five seats for £99 a month + VAT, every Team feature included. Past five seats it's £15 per extra seat (also + VAT). So six seats is £114, ten seats is £174, and so on. The flat-5 deal is for typical agency pod sizes — under five seats, per-seat is cheaper; at exactly five, flat-5 wins.
Can we white-label the whole tool?
Public portals are fully white-labelled on Team — your logo, your colours, your domain, your email-from address. Inside the workspace your team still sees the Narcove brand. We don't white-label the editor tool itself; that would mean shipping support for every brand we serve.
What about onboarding new client workspaces?
We have templates. A typical studio sets up a brand sprint template, a website build template, and a retainer template. Spin up a new workspace from a template in under a minute. The columns, default labels, and AI seed data come along.
Do you do introduction calls for studios?
Yes. Team customers get a 30-minute kickoff call to set up workspaces, port any existing data, and walk through the AI features. After that, support is over email with a 24-hour SLA. Quarterly product strategy calls are included on the Team plan.
Try it on a real client
Start free for one project. Move to Team when you're ready for branded portals and multi-workspace. Book a 30-minute call if you want a walkthrough first.