At AG Web Studios we've always run a small, deliberate book of clients. Design and engineering work, spread across long retainers, recurring licenses, and the occasional bespoke project. It's a practice we're proud of. But for years, the operations side of it didn't really live anywhere.
It lived in a tangle of spreadsheets, half-fitting SaaS subscriptions, and notes scattered between the two of us. Nothing was broken, exactly. It just meant that "where does this live" was always a question with more than one answer, and the honest answer was usually "somewhere, probably."
You can check out what we ended up building here: Clientia
The breaking point
The thing that finally pushed us over was a familiar one. A renewal we almost missed. An invoice that quietly fell through the cracks. And the slow, slightly embarrassing realisation that the tools we'd brought in to help were costing us more time than they saved.
So we did the obvious, tedious thing. We wrote down everything our practice actually needed, sketched the smallest workspace that could hold it, and started building.
Now I know how that sounds, because it's how every founder origin story sounds. So let me be precise about what it actually was. Not a pivot. Not a deck. Not some market we'd cleverly identified. Just a Friday-afternoon decision to stop fighting our own tooling.
The first version of Clientia had no sign-up flow and no pricing page. It ran inside AG Web Studios, for AG Web Studios, and it did the job the spreadsheets had been doing badly.
So why not just use a CRM?
We did look. Before writing a single line, we looked. And the honest answer for why we didn't land on an existing CRM or practice-management tool is the one we still say out loud: we didn't want another CRM, we wanted to stop managing our practice across seven different tabs.
Because here's the thing. It wasn't that any single tool was bad at its job. There's a perfectly good CRM out there. A perfectly good license tracker. A perfectly good invoicing tool, a perfectly good e-signature service, a perfectly good something for every individual piece. The problem was never finding one of them. The problem was that running our practice meant finding all of them.
So we'd end up with a CRM here, billing over there, contracts in a third place, license keys in a spreadsheet because nobody sells that as a product, and an analytics tool bolted on top to make sense of the rest. Five providers. Five subscriptions. Five logins, five data models that don't talk to each other, and five separate bills landing at five different times of the month.
And none of this is groundbreaking technology, by the way. I want to be clear about that. Client records, invoices, signed contracts, expiry alerts… none of it is new, and Clientia didn't invent any of it. What nobody seemed to ship was all of it together. Under one subscription. As one connected system, where a client, their licenses, their invoices and their contracts are actually the same client, instead of five strangers who happen to share a name across five tools.
Every tool we tried was also built for a business shaped slightly differently from ours. Too much pipeline, not enough retainer. Too much ticketing, not enough licensing. And bending ourselves to fit each one, then gluing them together by hand, felt like more work than the spreadsheets had ever been.
So instead of adapting to five tools, we built the one we actually wanted. That's a privilege a two-person studio has that a venture-backed team doesn't. We only had to satisfy one customer… and that customer was already in the room.
What it actually does today
Strip the origin story away and Clientia is a workspace for the parts of running a client practice that never show up in the deliverable. The unglamorous stuff. Here's what that means in practice.
Clients get a living record instead of a contact card. Tier, contacts, history, and a sense of relationship health. The kind of detail a senior partner used to keep in their own head, now shared with the rest of the firm instead of walking out the door when they do.
Licenses get tracked the way seats actually behave. Provisioned, reassigned, retired, with expiry alerts that fire before the client notices something has lapsed. Which is, you'll remember, the exact failure mode that started this whole thing.
Payments are built around the reality that most of our revenue is retainer-shaped. So monthly invoicing, direct debit, cards, wires, all reconciled automatically instead of matched by hand against a bank statement at month end. (If you've ever done that at 11pm on the last of the month, you know why this one matters to me.)
Contracts cover the other end of the relationship. Templates, redlines, e-signature, and an audit trail that holds up if anyone ever needs to point to exactly who agreed to what, and when. This piece has changed shape more than any other as we've used it, and it's still changing. We'd rather get it right slowly than freeze it early just because it shipped first.
And underneath all of it, an intelligence layer surfaces the things a careful operator would otherwise have to catch by hand. Engagement softening. Usage creeping past a limit. An invoice sitting overdue. It flags them before any of it turns into an awkward conversation.
None of this reads like a roadmap, because it isn't one. Every piece exists because we hit the specific problem it solves while running our own studio. And the only bar for whether something ships is whether it makes our own Mondays a little quieter.
Why we're sharing it now
Clientia is still under active development, and we use it every day to run AG Web Studios. That's not a marketing line, it's a constraint. Bugs hit us first. Friction lands on our own desks before it lands on anyone else's, which is exactly why the rough edges keep getting sanded down instead of shipped and forgotten.
We're opening it up slowly, to a small number of firms. The thing that makes it useful (built in production, by the people who actually answer the support emails, restrained enough that every feature has to earn its place) is much easier to keep true at a small scale than a large one. There's no support tier between you and the founders. Mostly because there's no one else yet.
So if you're running a small practice, and you've had your own version of the almost-missed renewal or the invoice that slipped through the cracks, that's the exact shape of problem this was built for.
We're letting firms in a few at a time, and the way to get in is the waitlist. So if any of this sounded familiar, head over to clientia.app/waitlist and put your name down. We read every sign-up, we'll reach out as spots open, and there's no pitch waiting on the other side. Just us, slowly opening the door to the thing we built for ourselves.
Let's see where this goes.