Agency setup, one account for five client sites or separate workspaces?
Run a small CRO agency, five retainer clients, all of them want personalization on their sites. Trying to figure out the clean way to structure this before I start wiring things up.
Questions:
- do I make one big account and cram all five sites in, or is there a proper per-client boundary?
- do the plan quotas (MAU etc) pool across sites or does each client burn their own?
- and the one that always bites agencies later, what happens when a client leaves? I want a story where their setup goes with them cleanly
resold tooling before and the billing seams are always where it gets ugly
2 answers
Structuring this up front is the right move. The hierarchy is: an organization contains workspaces, and each workspace holds environments (dev and prod) with their own application IDs.
For an agency, the natural boundary is one workspace per client. That keeps each client's data, audiences, experiences, and traffic fully separated, and each site gets its own application IDs per environment, so nothing bleeds between retainers. See organizational models for how the hierarchy maps to an agency setup.
On quotas: MAU, slots, and experiences attach to the plan. They are not an informal pool you can spread across unrelated client sites, so plan each client's traffic as burning its own MAU meter and size accordingly.
For the five-clients-with-transfer-on-exit setup specifically, Scale is the better fit than trying to force it into Growth. It is the custom-pricing tier built exactly for non-standard arrangements like multi-client volume, and the offboarding story is the kind of thing worth settling in a sales conversation before the first client is live rather than when one leaves.
Running a similar setup at our agency, one practical addition: use the dev environment inside each client workspace as your staging playground. Each environment has its own application ID, so you can build and test audiences and experiences against the client's staging site without touching their production traffic or their MAU. Made client sign-off much smoother for us, they review on staging, we promote to prod.