Failure PatternDecision layer
The Sitedropper Draft Gate Trap: Why Agencies Fail When Every Client Preview Stays Unpublished
Symptom: Client-facing preview links still resolve to a Draft URL weeks after the review call, so the client keeps asking whether the site is live. Root cause: Draft visibility is the default for every deployment, and nothing in the Analyze, Build, Deploy pipeline forces a promotion step, so projects sit in Draft unless someone deliberately switches them to Public.
By InnovaAI ResearchPublished Updated
How do you recognize it?
- •Client-facing preview links still resolve to a Draft URL weeks after the review call, so the client keeps asking whether the site is live.
- •Deployment counts climb past the Free plan's 30 per month because the team redeploys the same project repeatedly instead of promoting one build.
- •Agencies on the $2.5/month Starter plan never connect the client's own domain, so every deliverable ships on a Sitedropper URL.
- •Password-protected previews get forwarded to the client's whole team, and nobody tracks who holds the password once the project is approved.
Why does it happen?
- •Draft visibility is the default for every deployment, and nothing in the Analyze, Build, Deploy pipeline forces a promotion step, so projects sit in Draft unless someone deliberately switches them to Public.
- •The Free plan caps projects at 3 and deployments at 30 per month, which pushes multi-client agencies to spread work across accounts or burn deployments on rebuilds rather than on the single promotion that matters.
- •Custom domain connection and verified-email private sharing are Starter features at $2.5/month ($2.08/month annual), so agencies that stay on Free cannot hand a client a branded, access-controlled preview.
- •The deployment path is tied to supported AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, Pi) over the hosted MCP endpoint, so a client project built outside those agents has to go through ZIP upload or the REST API, and that handoff is where review gates get skipped.
How do you fix it?
- •Open the project in the Sitedropper dashboard and change visibility from Draft to Public, or to Password protected if the client has not signed off, before the next status call.
- •Move the account to Starter at $2.5/month so the client's own domain can be connected and preview access can be limited to verified emails.
- •Audit the deployment counter against the plan limit (30 per month on Free, 150 on Starter) and stop rebuilding projects that only need a visibility change.
- •For projects not built in a supported agent, upload the ZIP through the browser or call the REST API once, then treat that deployment as the single source of truth for the client preview.
More on Sitedropper
- StrategySitedropper: Why Draft-First Deploys Change Agency Delivery Economics
- ConceptSitedropper Draft Gate
- Evaluation RuleSitedropper Rule: Adopt Only When Your Delivery Stack Runs on MCP-Connected AI Coding Agents
- Decision FrameworkSitedropper: Buy vs Skip for Agencies Shipping AI-Built Client Sites
- Implementation BlueprintSitedropper Client Preview Pipeline (5-7 days)
- Operating ProcedureSitedropper Client Preview Handoff (Delivery)
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