Run client work with agency mode and sub-accounts

Agencies ship dozens of client sites a year, and almost every one needs a contact or lead form. Building intake plumbing per client - mail credentials, spam tuning, deliverability monitoring, a dashboard - is the kind of work that does not scale, and gluing every client's forms into one shared account creates a different problem: one client's data sitting next to another's, with no clean wall between them.

Formspring's agency mode is built for exactly this shape of work. It gives you three things on top of the core form backend: sub-accounts to isolate each client, projects to group a client's forms and submissions, and a white-label client portal so each client sees their own leads under your brand, on your domain. The agencies use case is the marketing overview; this guide is the how-to.

Agency mode is available on the Team and Scale plans. Everything below assumes a top-level Team or Scale workspace - the agency-mode surfaces are gated to it, and sub-accounts themselves cannot reach the agency controls.

A sub-account is a separate, isolated space for one client, created and managed from your top-level agency workspace. The isolation is the point: one client's forms, submissions, and files never sit in the same bucket as another's, so there is no risk of cross-client leakage and no awkward shared-login arrangement.

This mirrors how Formspring structures workspaces generally. Each team has its own forms, submissions, webhooks, and member list, and forms cannot move between teams - so you pick the right space before you build. Agency mode layers sub-account management on top of that model: you create and remove sub-accounts from one place rather than juggling separate logins, and your agency members keep oversight across all of them while each client stays walled off.

The practical workflow is one sub-account per client. New client, new sub-account; their site's form points at an endpoint inside their space; their submissions are theirs alone. When the engagement ends, you can hand the sub-account over or remove it without touching any other client's data. The post on form workspaces for agencies walks through the day-to-day.

Within a workspace, projects group forms and their submissions and digests, so a single client's intake stays organised even when it spans several forms - a contact form, a quote request, a newsletter signup.

A project is a grouping inside a team: forms belong to a project, and the project carries their submissions and weekly digests with it. You set a "current project" to focus the dashboard on one client's work at a time, and that choice persists across sign-outs so you return to where you left off. For an agency, projects are how you keep "everything for Client A" together and separate from "everything for Client B" inside a workspace, and how you assign the right work to the right people.

Projects are not gated to agency mode - any team can use them to organise forms - but they become essential once you are running multiple clients, because they are the unit you scope a client portal and team assignments around. Combined with sub-accounts (the hard isolation boundary) and projects (the organisational grouping), you get a tidy two-level structure: a sub-account per client, projects within it for distinct streams of work.

The feature that makes agency mode feel like your product rather than a tool you resell is the client portal: a clean, white-label view where a client logs in and sees only their own leads - under your brand, on your domain.

The portal carries your branding, not Formspring's. You configure the look in portal settings, and you can point it at your own custom domain so clients never see a Formspring URL - the domain is treated as a customer vanity surface and deliberately does not leak the underlying platform's identity. Inside, the portal is a working lead board, not just a read-only list: clients (and your team) can move submissions through stages you define, leave notes on a submission, and run bulk actions. You invite clients to their portal with scoped access, so they get exactly the view of their leads you want them to have and nothing more.

This is what turns intake from a deliverable you set up once into an ongoing, branded surface you can put in front of a client as part of the engagement. The agencies use case frames the pitch, and the post on a form automation platform for agencies shows the portal alongside routing and automations.

Agency work is as much about who can do what as about isolation. Formspring's roles and permissions model gives you four roles - owner, admin, editor, viewer - and the right pattern for client work is usually: your agency members as admins (they build and manage forms and integrations), and client members as viewers so they can see and export their submissions without changing anything.

For external collaborators with a strict scope, the docs are explicit: an external party should be an editor on a shared space and never the owner. Roles also govern API token abilities - a member can never mint a token with abilities their role does not have - so a client viewer cannot accidentally be handed write access through the API.

Handover matters at the end of an engagement. Because forms, submissions, and webhooks belong to the team, not the individual, you can remove an agency member or transfer ownership without losing any data. Ownership transfer is owner-only and documented in the ownership-transfer doc - the clean way to hand a finished project's workspace to the client. The inviting-members doc covers bringing the client in to begin with.

Agency mode - sub-accounts, project assignment, and the client portal - is gated on the agency plan flag, which is on for the Team plan and the Scale plan. The Free and Pro plans do not include agency mode (Pro is a single-team plan for one business, not a multi-client one). Projects on their own are available to any team, but sub-accounts and the white-label portal require Team or Scale.

A couple of operational notes worth knowing up front. Billing is per team: each workspace has its own subscription, which lets you put a client space on a paid plan that the client pays for while your agency workspace stays on its own plan - there is no single account-level plan that covers everything. And the agency surfaces are reachable only from a top-level Team/Scale workspace; a sub-account cannot itself manage other sub-accounts.

To get going: start free, then upgrade your top-level workspace to Team or Scale to unlock agency mode. Create a sub-account per client, group each client's forms into projects, and stand up a white-label portal on your domain. For the bigger picture of running intake at agency scale, the agencies use case and the send-submissions-to-your-CRM guide cover routing those client leads into the rest of your stack.