2024-10-17 - Client billing is coming back!
At Webflow Conf 2024 a rebranded feature referred to as Client Payments was announced for later this year.
It will allow you to keep a client's hosted site in your workspace, but to charge the hosting fees to your client's card. Stay tuned.
When Sygnal was first developing as an agency, Webflow's client billing feature was one of the big attractors of the platform. It simplified our processes, let us focus on project delivery, and minimized our ongoing work.
We build sites, and we really didn't want to be bothered with much else.
Sadly, a couple of years ago Webflow decided to remove the client billing capability, and a lot of pain was felt by the community.
It was an extremely painful transition, that involved clients paying a good deal more with the addition of billing platform & admin fees, and local sales taxes.
But you know what?
After the bumpy transition, and the hours invested learning and trying out billing systems, we're actually happier.
Why owning your own client billing is better
It's still automated
Most billing services offer a subscription capability with a monthly, quarterly, or annual billing option. These keep your billing automated, so that the only time you need to do anything is when a credit card expires.
Billing can be centralized
In the past clients got one invoice from Webflow for hosting, and another invoice for us for design & development work. Now, both invoices can come from the same billing platform, and everything related to the client's website costs can more easily be managed and tracked by them.
They know everything with our agency name "Sygnal" on it is related to their website.
You can consolidate services
More complex Webflow builds involve more services and fees... Airtable, Xano, Wized, Jetboost, Vimeo, Basin, Make, Zapier... and in many cases you may be asked to handle other services for your client, such as email setup and domain names.
In some cases it makes sense to have the client billed directly for a service, but in others, you may be able to share that one service fractionally across multiple clients.
In a shared-services situation it makes sense to charge each client $5/mo additional, rather than one client $30/mo, and if you have 50 clients, you've just added significant value while also making more money.
Primary examples of this are automation platforms like Zapier and Make, and our favorite email-submission-handling solution, Basin.
Choosing a platform
We can't offer specific advice here, but there are hundreds of platforms out there.
Paying for a platform and investing your time in learning it only makes sense for agencies that are building and hosting multiple sites. If you're doing a one-off site, you're probably better off using a client-centric workspace setup.
More professional platforms include Xero and MYOB.
Subscription-specific solutions include platforms like Bonsai. This was Webflow's recommended solution when client-billing was shut down, but our team didn't like it. We found a lot of issues with international taxation, and the recurring subscriptions system itself, like it's inability to re-collect and invoice after a failed charge.
More technical, but powerful platforms include Stripe.
What to look for
Just a few tips. We might expand on this later.
Make certain you test out the features first, and trial it with one or two clients before committing to a solution. Diving in blind and unaware will probably leave you in a very uncomfortable situation.
Priorities;
- Easy to use, or at your level of technical comfort
- Affordable, for the features you want
- Nice looking invoices
- Easy ability to setup a subscription, email it to a client, and have them enter their CC details
- Easy ability to update the CC on an existing subscription, when it expires or is otherwise invalidated
Ideally;
- The ability to adjust the monthly billing amount for a subscription without needing to cancel and issue a new subscription invoice ( which requires clients to enter a new CC, etc. )
- The ability to custom-build subscription, and show line items on the invoice, e.g. Webflow, Zapier, Basin, etc.
History
As best we know it...
September 27, 2016: Launch of Client Billing
- Webflow launched the Client Billing feature to help freelancers and agencies manage their client hosting payments directly through the Webflow platform. The feature allowed users to automate hosting payments, add custom fees, and maintain control over hosted sites without needing to transfer ownership to clients.
April 5, 2022: Announcement of Phasing Out
- Webflow announced that Client Billing would be phased out by early 2023. This decision was made to free up engineering resources for core improvements to the Webflow Designer and CMS. Webflow also partnered with Bonsai to offer an alternative for handling client billing, providing users with a 50% discount for the first year of Bonsai's services to ease the transition.
July 2022: End of Support for Client Billing
- Webflow ceased providing support for Client Billing-related issues in July 2022, as part of the process to phase out the feature.
Early 2023: Complete Phase-Out
- By early 2023, Client Billing was fully phased out. Users were required to transition their billing arrangements to other platforms, such as Bonsai, to continue managing recurring client payments.
These changes were part of Webflow's shift to focus on core product features, citing maintenance challenges with Stripe integration and the need to balance feature requests with ongoing support issues.
Searched 3 sites
Late 2024: Re-Introduction
At the Webflow Conference 2024, it was announced that the Client Billing feature is being reintroduced.
The exact timeline for full implementation was not specified, but is expected later this year.
