How does Chassis handle one project per client?

Each retainer becomes a Chassis project. Tags carry the client name and engagement type. Milestones map to deliverables (campaign launch, brand refresh phase, monthly retainer cycle). Owners are real Crew employees so utilization signals — who's on what — are accurate without a separate spreadsheet.

Can Chassis handle multiple clients at once?

Yes. Chassis is multi-project by design. The dashboard shows all active retainers; filter by tag or owner to slice down to one client. Forge weekly digest summarizes what shipped per client, useful for Monday-morning client status emails or your weekly internal review.

Does Chassis track billable hours for agency client work?

Not as a built-in stopwatch field today. Agencies that need billable-hour tracking pair Chassis with a separate time tool (Toggl, Harvest) and use Chassis for the deliverable + status side. We're tracking demand for native time tracking and may ship it as a Chassis add-on or a separate Drive.

Can clients see their own Chassis project?

Today, Chassis is internal-only — the cockpit is for your team, not your clients. Status updates go out via Forge weekly digests (you copy into an email or shared doc), and Webster product pages can render selected project state to a public page if you want a client-facing view. Native client portal is on the roadmap.

Does Chassis pair with sales-pipeline tools for agencies?

Yes — Prospector (the pipeline Drive) ships with the SALES exec ($99/mo). New client wins from Prospector promote into a Chassis retainer project, and the closing deal value carries over as a tag. The pipeline-to-delivery handoff stops being a manual data re-entry.

What's the right pricing tier for an agency?

Most agencies pair the OPS exec ($299/mo, includes Chassis + 7 other Drives) with the SALES exec ($99/mo, includes Prospector + 2 others) for a full operations + pipeline cockpit. Total: $398/mo. Larger agencies can go to the full C-Suite at $599/mo.

← CHASSIS USE CASE · AGENCIES

Chassis for agencies.

The PM Drive for client-services agencies that don't want to pay for a PM tool plus a CRM plus a status-report generator plus a retro tool. One project per retainer. Milestones for deliverables. Owners are real Crew employees, so utilization is a side-effect of normal work, not a separate spreadsheet.

Pairs naturally with the OPS exec ($299/mo) for an operations cockpit and the SALES exec ($99/mo) for the pipeline that feeds new retainers. Total stack: $398/mo, no per-seat creep as the agency grows.

The job.

Agency work is parallel client retainers, each with its own creative deliverables, status cadence, and stakeholder politics. A typical 12-person shop is running 8–15 active engagements at any moment — some monthly retainers, some fixed-scope projects, some discovery phases bleeding into delivery. The PM tool has to track all of it without making junior staff drown in admin and without making senior staff babysit a dashboard.

Most agencies duct-tape three to five tools together: a PM tool (Asana / Monday / Trello), a CRM for the pipeline (HubSpot / Pipedrive), a time tracker for billing (Toggl / Harvest), a status-report tool (or a manual Google Doc), and a retro tool (or a fading Notion page nobody updates). The seams are where revenue leaks. The status report misses what shipped because the PM tool didn't sync. The pipeline doesn't know which deals are at risk because nobody tagged the deliverable that slipped. The retainer renewal conversation happens with stale information.

Chassis is the project layer that ties those pieces together inside the cockpit. Retainers are projects. Deliverables are milestones. Owners are people you also pay (Crew) so utilization is real. The pipeline (Prospector, in the SALES exec bundle) hands won deals straight into Chassis projects without re-keying. Forge writes the weekly client status update from the activity log, not from your account manager's memory at 5pm Friday.

It is not a 200-person agency replacement for Workamajig or Mavenlink. It's the PM Drive for the 4–30-person shop that wants one cockpit, AI workflows that ship without add-ons, and a per-tenant price that doesn't punish growth.

How Chassis fits the agency workflow.

One project per client retainer.

Each engagement is a Chassis project. Tag with client name + engagement type (retainer / fixed-scope / discovery / pilot). Milestones map to deliverables: campaign launch, monthly retainer cycle, brand refresh phase 2. The dashboard shows all active retainers; filter by tag to slice to one client.

Owners are real Crew employees.

Task owners are the same Crew records HR, payroll, performance, and onboarding all reference. When a designer goes on PTO, every Chassis task assigned to them surfaces for reassignment. When you hire, the new account manager shows up in the owner picker the day they're added to Crew. Utilization across all retainers is visible without a separate sheet.

Forge writes weekly client status updates.

Hit "Generate weekly digest" on a project. Forge reads the activity log: what shipped, what's in flight, what's blocked. Drafts a status update grounded in the actual work, not your account manager's memory at 5pm Friday. Edit, copy into the client email or shared doc, send.

Auto-written retainer-cycle retros.

Close a monthly retainer cycle. Forge writes the retro: what shipped, what slipped, what to keep / cut / start. Pulls from the activity log. Useful for the renewal conversation, the internal post-mortem on a slipped engagement, and the keep / cut / start on the next month's plan.

Pipeline-to-delivery handoff.

When Prospector (the pipeline Drive in the SALES exec bundle) closes a deal, the deal can promote into a Chassis project with the engagement tag, deal value, and stakeholder list pre-populated. The handoff from sales to delivery stops being a manual data re-entry meeting.

Block-detection for at-risk deliverables.

Tasks that have been in Blocked > 7 days surface to the agency lead's inbox. The risk to a deliverable becomes a normal escalation, not a Friday surprise. Combined with Centerline's quarterly cadence, the conversation about which clients to keep / fire happens with real signal.

Workflow walkthrough — onboarding a new retainer.

Concrete five-step example. New client signs a six-month brand refresh retainer.

Promote the deal. Prospector marks the deal won. One-click promote into a Chassis project. Engagement tag, deal value, stakeholder names carry over. The discovery doc from the sales conversation is already attached.
Scaffold the project. Hit "Scaffold from venture profile" — Forge generates a starter project structure based on the engagement type (brand refresh, six-month retainer): discovery milestone, design milestone, rollout milestone, monthly checkpoint cycles. Adjust dates. Done.
Assign the team. Pick owners from Crew — strategist, designer, account manager. Owners are real records, so utilization across this and your other 11 active retainers is visible immediately. Reshuffle if anyone is over-committed.
Run weekly cadence. Tasks move across To-do / Doing / Blocked / Done. Daily standup is a 5-minute look at the project board. Friday afternoon: hit Generate weekly digest. Forge writes the client status update grounded in the activity log. Edit, send.
Close monthly cycle, get auto-retro. End of month one: close the cycle. Forge writes the retro. Use it for the internal review and the client's next-month plan. Burndown updates for next month's planning. Repeat.

The other Drives that come bundled.

Agencies rarely run on a PM tool alone. The natural Drive bundle for an agency is OPS + SALES.

OPS exec — the COO-shaped exec ($299/mo). Operates Chassis (PM), Centerline (cadence), Crew (people), Atlas (knowledge), Onramp (hiring), Cohort (programs), Gauge (performance), Relay (support). The full operations cockpit for a services-first agency.
SALES exec — the VP-Sales-shaped exec ($99/mo). Operates Prospector (pipeline), OODA (competitive intel), Signals (market signals). New client wins promote directly into Chassis retainer projects.
Why this combo. Pipeline (SALES) feeds delivery (OPS+Chassis). The retainer renewal conversation happens with delivery signal in hand. The team utilization view flows from real Crew records, not a spreadsheet. Total: $398/mo for the whole stack.

PRICING

Pricing for agencies.

Standalone Chassis — $49/mo. Just the PM Drive, no exec. Right if you already have your own ops lead and only want the project layer.
OPS + SALES — $398/mo. The natural agency stack. Chassis + Centerline + Crew + Atlas + Onramp + Cohort + Gauge + Relay (OPS bundle) plus Prospector + OODA + Signals (SALES bundle).
Full C-Suite — $599/mo. All five execs. Adds GROWTH (CMO + content/SEO/email/ads), TECH (CTO + Atlas + Beacon), FINANCE (free until $3K MRR).
7-day free trial on first install. Cockpit itself is free. Annual billing saves 20%. Per-tenant pricing — no per-seat surprise as the agency grows past 12 people.

Run your agency on Chassis.

Sign up for Merkava, install Chassis, scaffold your first retainer project. Status reports writing themselves by week two.

Get started Back to Chassis See pricing