"How is it going?" is an invisible tax on creative work. It interrupts you, it arrives in the wrong channel, and it forces you to rebuild the state of the project in your head before you can answer.

The client portal answers before the question is asked. It is a public page, opened with a link, where your client follows the work. No account, no password, nothing to install on their side.

The portal belongs to the client, with their projects inside it. The link opens a cover page listing every project of theirs that is active, on hold or completed, and each one has its own page.

The "not included" block matters as much as the first two. Scope disputes usually start with something the client assumed was in.

The portal has a Links section where you can put up to 12 links per project: a working folder, a Figma file, a moodboard, a gallery of drafts. They appear on the project page for your client, next to everything else.

Here is the exact path, because it is not where you would expect it. Open the project, scroll to the portal section, click Send update, choose an update type and press Generate. On the screen that follows, under the email body, there is a box called Links for your client. Add them there.

Adding a link takes effect immediately and it is independent of the update: the link appears in the portal whether or not you go on to send that email, and it stays there for every future update. We know this is buried, and we are moving it somewhere sensible.

What is not possible yet is uploading a file for your client to download. If you need to hand over actual files, link to where they already live.

A document only appears in the portal if you deliberately share it there. Nothing is listed automatically, so drafts and rejected proposals never show up by accident.

The list shows the name, type, status and date, with no values. Opening a document is a separate matter: your client has to verify their email address first, and only signed documents can be opened, because those are the ones with a final PDF behind them.

No value, price, invoice or payment appears anywhere in the portal pages. It is about the work, not the contract.

The one exception is deliberate and yours to make: a signed document that you chose to share does contain its own terms and values, because it is a document your client has already received and signed. Everything else stays out.

Your client can see, not edit. There is no comment box and no upload on their side. This is deliberate: the portal is a window into the project, and everything that changes the project stays with you.

Inside the app, the portal has its own section on two screens.

Rotating and revoking live only on the client screen on purpose. The link belongs to the client, so revoking it from inside one project would take down every other project of theirs. Both actions ask for confirmation.

A portal link can be left open indefinitely or given an expiry of 30, 90, 180 or 365 days, from the dropdown on the client screen. After that date the link stops working, and you can always remove the expiry again.

It is worth setting one for finished work. A client whose project closed two years ago has no reason to still be holding a live link.

The section shows when the portal was last opened and how many times. Opening it yourself does not count: the Open portal button previews the page without adding a visit, so the signal measures your client, not you.

The portal page runs outside the app shell. The people reading it are not TCB users and never agreed to our terms, so none of our analytics, chat or authentication tools load there, and the link itself is never recorded in our telemetry. The page carries its own privacy notice, linked in the footer, which explains that you are the one deciding what appears and who your client should contact about it.

Anyone holding the link can open the page, so treat it like a shared document. If it ends up somewhere it should not be, rotate it: a new link is issued and the old one stops working immediately.