Managed Customers

Give a customer a read-only portal for one of your hosted projects. They can follow the project — its live address, its release history — and message you. You keep ownership, deployment rights, domains, secrets and billing.

This suits work you deliver for someone else: an agency building a client’s site, or a developer looking after a site for a small business.

Who can use it

Managed customers are part of plans that include managed accounts. When yours does, Managed appears in the sidebar and each hosting project gets a Customers tab. Managed → Settings shows whether your plan includes it. If your plan stops including it, customers you already have keep their access; only new invitations are blocked.

What a customer can and can’t do

Access is per project. Someone who is a customer on two of your projects has two portals and two separate conversations.

Inviting a customer

You need at least one hosted project first. Open Managed in the sidebar and choose Invite a customer:

1. Pick the Project.
2. Optionally enter the Customer email. With an address you can also tick:
   • Email the invitation for me — YOLO sends the invitation.
   • Only let this address redeem it — the invitation works only for an account with that verified address. Without this, the invitation is bound to whoever redeems it first.
3. Choose Create invitation.

The result shows an Invitation link and a Code. The code is shown once and can’t be retrieved later, so copy it before you choose I’ve copied it. If you didn’t have YOLO email it, send the link to your customer yourself. An invitation expires after 7 days.

You can also invite from the Customers tab on a hosting project.

Managing customers

The Managed page lists every customer with their project, access and billing standing, and a summary of who needs your attention. Access is one of Active, Invited, Invite expired or Revoked. If a customer redeemed with a different address from the one you entered, the row says so.

Each row’s menu offers:

• Re-issue invitation — while an invitation is still pending. The new code replaces the old one, which stops working.
• Record billing arrangement — see below.
• Revoke access — permanent. To give access back, send a new invitation. Your project, its domains and anything you bill the customer are untouched.

Open a customer to see the invitation history: when it was created, who redeemed it, and when access was revoked.

Billing arrangements

YOLO doesn’t collect payments from your customers. A billing arrangement is your own record of how you bill them: Not billed, Included in another engagement, Invoiced directly, or Billed through YOLO, with an amount, how often, the next expected payment, and whether it is Up to date, Payment due, Overdue or Paused.

It is a record only. Marking a customer overdue never changes their access.

Messages and branding

Conversations with a customer live on the project’s Customers tab, and in your Inbox , where each conversation is labelled with its project. Enquiries your site sends can also reach the customer’s thread — see Inbox notifications.

The Customers tab also holds the portal branding your customers see: display name, color, theme and logo. Branding applies across all your customers.

What your customer sees

1. They open the invitation link, or enter the code, and choose Continue.
2. They accept with an account they already have, or create one with an email and password. If you locked the invitation to an address, they must sign in with an account that has that address.
3. They land on their portal. Each project has an Overview — a preview of the site, its status, its live URL and its update history — and Messages.

Customers sign in later at the portal sign-in page with the same account. Accounts created through an invitation are portal-only: they reach the portal, not YOLO Studio.

Related pages

• Managing Projects — what the owner controls
• Inbox notifications — site enquiries and customer threads