What the portal is
"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.
One link per client, not per project
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.
What your client sees on a project
The project status and a progress bar
What's included, the delivery stages in order
The scope in three blocks: what comes in the package, the add-ons they chose, and what is not included
That last block matters as much as the first two. Scope disputes usually start with something the client assumed was in.
No money, ever
No value, price, invoice or payment appears in the portal. It is about the work, not the contract.
Read-only by design
Your client can see, not edit. There is no approval, no comment box and no upload. This is deliberate: the portal is a window into the project, and everything that changes the project stays with you.
Managing the link
Inside the app, the portal has its own section on two screens.
On the client screen, you get the cover link, whether it has been opened, and the actions to rotate or revoke it.
On the project screen, you get the direct link to that project, and the primary action is Send update, which is what brings the client back to it.
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.
Knowing whether they read it
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.
Privacy on your client's side
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.
What if the link gets forwarded?
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.